YouSaid · the spoken record

Martin Shkreli

lines on the record: 62
first: 2026-04-23
most recent: 2026-04-23
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

“I'm not kidding. I've heard this very serious people that, and the numbers are like, they're staggering, that they're willing to drop hundreds of millions or even billions on Samsex thing. And so obviously, you know, there's something here. And to throw a life away, that like such a unique life away. And I was making fun of Sam. I was digging a little bit. And now I feel like, you know, he has to go through that journey, that hero's journey of like, he's got to hit rock bottom. And then I think, you know, perhaps, you know, the time will be where he gets out. Maybe it's this administration, maybe it's the next one. But I see a big glorious comeback if he can find this humanity, find this new person.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The pain of learning who you are, the pain of going through this pressure chamber that prison is and forcing you to reflect on like what did I miss? What is this all about? And five years in prison and then coming out. And I've heard a rumor that there are investors who have already lined up for Samsung.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But how do you take that and get the trust? I like this guy, I'm gonna root for this guy. That's what he's got to focus on. And he's brilliant, so I think he might be able to do it, but it's going to take some soul searching. Might even take some pain. He's obviously going through pain right now, but I'd love to see him out. I'd love to see what he could do for society, and I feel like as long as he can be a human, which is, you know, some people, we joke about them being lizards or robots or whatever. And there's a human in everyone. And I think this experience may actually, it's going to sound really crazy, might actually be the best thing for him. Because, you know, it's...”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If he does get early, which again, I'm advocating for, but it's been met with this very stiff resistance of who really is this guy as a human. You know, that's the question I get back from the Trump camp. Think that once he does that, not only will people in politics feel bad for him? America will feel bad for him. America will want to give him a second chance. Because the problem is there. The guy's obviously a genius. One of the best businessmen ever.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't think it. That was kind of my case. That's what I went to jail for. And so at least I gave the profits to the people. But I think that no matter how bad, no matter how big of a mistake you made, there's always redemption. It's just you have to show the vulnerability. You have to say I fucked up. You have to say, even if you don't say I fucked up, you have to show a scar or wound or bleed bleed a little bit. And I think that his thing is like, you know, he wants to fight, but he's not connecting and connecting is so important. And I feel like his upbringing is sort of like MIT math camp, Jane Street Life has led him to this position where he's hard to feel sorry for. He's hard to connect to him.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where is this 400 million coming from? I mean, most people don't have 400 million dollars. You know, Bezos doesn't put 400 million dollars in deals. Zuck doesn't put, you know, they're the richest guys in the world don't just drop $400 million on a single deal. The biggest VCs, maybe. That's still like a lot. So how'd this guy show up with 400 million to drop? And the answer was obvious. You took everyone's money to do it. And that's wrong. You could almost allow it if like, hey, it was going to go to all this depositors somehow. It was going to give us $105 on the dollar. Okay. You know, whatever. I didn't ask for the.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to go in his pocket. And not in the depositor's pocket, not in F, not even in FTX's pocket. So, like, you know, if you look at the round, it was series A by Sam Bank. Know, and it was like, well, at the time, that was the tell. That actually is how you would have told because.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't say that as a bad thing necessarily, but as somebody who understands his path in life, being a prodigy, being pushed on stage as like this intellectual guy and being shoved into this different room to room math camp, MIT, you know, Jane Street, you know, all this stuff, he maybe didn't have the time to be a normal person. And I think that that's what makes it so awkward and so untrusting. People look at him and they're like, I don't know about this guy. There's something about this guy I don't trust. And he's got to fight hard to make it real that he's a real dude with real life, with real friends, with real emotions. And then people will feel bad for him. But until then, it's like, how do we know this guy doesn't come and like pull the wool over our eyes again? And I feel like, you know, truth be told, like as much as anthropic was a successful investment, if you look back at that announcement, anthropic was those profits seemed like they're”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I talked to Sam. You know, I like him a lot. I think he should be out. I think the hard part here, and having talked to even the Trump administration about this, the hard part is Sam has got to show he's a normal guy. And I think he's struggled with that. He's obviously not that normal, you know, in a lot of ways. How many of us go to MIT? How many of us are a huge company? How many of us pick anthropic as the first? So there's something about Sam that people don't trust and there's something about Sam that He's got to really let his human side out. And one of the problems here is maybe he doesn't have one.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now they can work and the medical system that maybe have been spending a million per year per patient on this person and their productivity, you flip that around and it's an amazing beautiful thing that you will get paid for. To get paid for something, you have to show the value. And peptide, you can't show the value. Yeah, you're going to get some suckers to buy it. But that's not really exciting. So I don't know why I'd want to be an entrepreneur in this space when there's, you know, it's easy, I guess. It's like go-to-market, go to consumer, you know, direct to consumer kind of thing where you can, you know, finagle your way into getting some demand. But this isn't going to scale to like the reason Lily scaled this product really freaking works. And that's how you win. So I feel like, you know, good luck to it. I mean, I just don't think it's going to be a great place to play.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huntington's disease is deadly disease. Horrible genetic disease. Companies spent a couple hundred million dollars making this drug, and the people who are suffering, dying from the disease, can't get it, but I can get BPC 157 totally unregulated, stupid medicine that doesn't do anything. I can go inject that. It's sort of tough. I think that's terrible. And I feel like peptides are so safe. That's their one benefit that maybe people will just trick themselves into doing it. It'll be this weird Veblen good where it's like, oh yeah, I take this, this, and that. That's my stack. And it's not doing anything for you, but you're spending $1,000 a month on it. And you feel better about it and it gives you some placebo effect. I mean, it's a business. It's not a business I want to be in. Business of pharma is, you know, again, Neuralink, casting this pharma company for a second. I'm literally giving a million dollars a year of productivity to this person. I'm cutting the costs of everyone taking care of them and feeding them and doing all this stuff for them.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to be weird to see this happen because drugs are the reason we have an FDA and it's good is because snake oil sort of works for people. People want to think, they want to believe. And so if you think BPC 157 is working for you, you're not going to stop taking it and you love it. And you think, oh, well, it works for me. And you might think that, but you have to look at the trials. But nobody can convince the populace that statistics matter. You know, it's so hard. Your individual response, even though it's a non-response, it's just random noise around a distribution. You want to believe that it's relevant to you, that it changed something for you. So it's going to be hard to defeat that. I think regulations are the way to defeat it. But, you know, we're in this regulatory environment that that's really laissez-faire. I feel bad for it because there's actually drug companies, there's a Huntington's drug that was promising, maybe not perfect. And F.D.A. rejected it.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of permanently has lifted the bar for that disease. And eventually, GLPs, they're perfect. I mean, you really can't get a better one. So at the end of the day, Ozempi going generic, Munjaro, eventually it's 2040 or something, but eventually going generic. So markets price long-term asset value, long-term cash flows. So Lily's kind of screwed. They have to find a way to perpetuate their product. And one of the ways you could do that is manufacturing. But the problem is you sort of have to design a drug that's hard to manufacture. And if you want to keep it in the long run, and J and J figured out how to do this where for the longest times, small molecules like Claritin go generic very quickly.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dark drugs have a big, big problem. A friend of mine talked to Warren Buff about this. He wanted to sell his drug company. It was privately held. Wanted to sell to Warren Buffett. Buffett said no. And he said, the problem with pharma is IP. So we have to recreate our business every 10 years. Drug goes generic. I have to go find another one. Are you effing? Kidding me? Imagine being open AI or imagine 10 years after A16C. Actually, you're patting on venture capital expired. You got to go find a new business. Go do PE or go do lending or something. It's like, I was just getting started. I was just hitting my stride. And in pharma, you literally have to go do something else. And so Ozempix generic in like a year or two Ozempic is pretty good. And so the problem with drugs is you make a better and better drug and you reach the asymptote where it's like nobody's making a better hypertension drug because we have solved that problem. You can lower blood pressure. You don't need another one. And so once that patent expires.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before you even put a drug into an animal or in a petri dish, it's a theory game. And AI can actually do that. It can actually zip through thousands of ideas and come up with something. So I think there's something to work on there. And I feel like maybe it's anthropic that does drug company. Maybe it's OpenAI or maybe somebody else. But there could and should be a way to make this work. The drug companies themselves don't take to technology very easily or quickly. They're probably not the place to do this, but you still have to be a drug company. And I think that's what a lot of the Valley kind of doesn't get. They're like, we want it, we want to tackle the farm industry without being in the farm industry. And it's like, no, you have to go do trials. You have to go do the stuff that nobody wants to do. And that makes drugs kind of boring and shitty. And that's why like Vivek and myself were like two big interlopers and pharma. And we were both kind of not loved for lots of reasons. Because pharma is this old guy's game. I mean, the average pharmacy is like 60. There's no patch.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a million dollars a kid if you save their lives I think Elon's not a drug company, but he's sort of going to do the same thing with Neuralink. I mean, I think Neuralink's going to be a $100 billion plus, maybe even $200 billion company, because those patients and there's many of them, they want to walk. They want to talk. They want to be productive members of society. And he's making it happen. And again, that's a million dollars per patient productivity, which insurance is happy to pay. So I feel like the rare diseases, the Alzheimer's, the terrible cancers, this is where you go. I mean, the playbook hasn't changed. I think that the science is still really hard. I think AI is going to help a lot there coming up with new ideas. Fundamentally, the drug game is an idea game. You have to sit, toss and turn and say, I wonder if you inhibited, you know, aisle one, would that work for Alzheimer's? No, I don't think it crosses the blood brain barrier. Inflammation is not that important. But what if we did this? And you keep thinking and thinking and you have these ideas.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the people are suffering the most because you know that's where ironically that's where the money is. And for the longest time, these kind of cosmetic diseases actually weren't money makers. And GLP's been around 20 years. And finally, a lot of pharma guys are scratching their heads like, why now? We've had these for a while and they just finally got mainstream after 18 years of watching this drug class be kind of like, meh, you know, they finally broke through because they are fantastic drugs. But like for the longest time, the way you made money in pharma was you went after the most heinous, horrible, terrible illness and made a change, made a difference in somebody's life. And that's how you made money. And I think that that's still the case. It's still the case. You have to go after the toughest cancer, the Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy has been a passion of mine for the longest time. My first company was named after muscular dystrophy. That's, you know, it's a death sentence disease.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and this is where, like, you know, I don't want to tear jerk anybody, but like somebody sent me a message today or last few days, you might have seen on social media about a West Point guy, such a strong military network. His son just died. His two more sons or two more kids that have the same disease. They're going to die too. I just had a baby boy. Look, you'd move heaven and earth for anything for your kids. How many people in the world know how to develop rare disease drugs? Well, I got one approved. There's maybe 100 guys on planet Earth that can say that. And I'd happily, you know, try to develop a drug for this guy. I got banned from the farm industry for sort of political reasons. I still might want to try and do it in Europe or something or get a special exemption. But there are people dying. You know, there are people dying of hundreds of rare diseases, tons of cancers. Go where the hardest stuff is.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, F all that. You know, I'm going to do this myself. And okay, you know, I get it. I mean, it's crazy that maybe it was crazy for me to tell Congress to go F itself. And it's just as crazy to go make your own medicine. But DIY medicine, this is the dumbest thing ever. So to me as a pharma guy, I would focus on.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drug classes in pharma for the longest time because their half lifes are generally in the minutes. And GLPs are frankenpeptides. They take GLPs and they add these fatty acids, they conjugate these different things that make the half-life better. And they sort of become biological peptides that are like, you know, they're hybrid drugs, basically. Angen call them peptibodies. Peptides in general are just these terrible asset class for pharma because you need drugs that have long half-lives. So BPC7 is not dangerous because it's gone within like 60 seconds by the time you inject it, it's dead. And so it doesn't have the time to do anything useful. Any drug guy could tell you that. But I think what this really is about isn't about pharmacology or science. This is about rebellion. I'm a rebel. I get this. It's, I don't want to pay Pfizer. I don't want to see my doctor. I don't want to pay insurance. I don't want to get a prescription for.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or the landing up on its head. Drug development makes that look easy. And because I want you to, in your mind, shrink down the molecule to the molecular and nanomolecular size where angstroms are a unit of length, you know, 100 nanometer. And imagine the atoms, some kind of organic molecule. And imagine those atoms interacting with proteins atoms. And you're telling me you understand what's going on there. It's really not easy. And I think when I see people do like 10”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To look at the stupid drug, and it's the worst drug ever. And nobody understands medicine unless you've actually made medicine successfully. My first, I got my first FDA approved a drug, it was like four or five years ago. We've got three or four years ago. It was like accelerator. We finally got final approval, which is cool. Accelerated approval is actually contingent. So I got a drug through the FDA. There are not that many. There are about 30 or 40 a year that got through FDA. So, you know, it's a pretty, pretty hollowed haul. And unless you've done that, you know, you really don't know what it looks like. Drugs are like seemingly simplistic. You look at this clarity on my desk or something and you sort of say, oh, I could do this too. And the reality is, you know, it's pretty freaking difficult. In fact, some people say, well, how hard would it be to make this drug or something like that? I said, imagine the SpaceX landing, like the chopstick.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I couldn't have higher conviction the peptide thing is all bullshit. Self-diagnosing and self-administering medicine that you don't know anything about. I mean, this looked literally craziest thing ever, right? I mean, you know, you have to be out of your mind. And I understand, like, all right, you're Patrick Carlson, you're a superbillionaire, you're maybe one of my investors, Naval, you kind of like, you want to take health into your own hands. You have a lot of doctors around. Okay, you're a special case. But you want to impersonate those guys. I think that's where it sort of ends. I mean, the star asset for these guys is this drug BPC-157. I spent a few days on this thing. I took a few days out of my life, wasted 1% of my year.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. That's encouraging. I want to shift to biotech and pharma. If you were building a pharma company today, I'm curious what you might pursue one range of questions. The other thing I'm curious to get into is sort of you have this great peptide debate on TBPN, which we loved. And, you know, it seems like that's all the rage and only going to be increasingly so. And yet it seems you're bearish on it. And then also just GLP1s and what that means. So let you take it away.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up his portfolio, he doesn't care about the five that everyone knows about. So I feel like vibe coding is kind of a fantastic thing where you can cut your software costs a little bit or just raise the ability of your software. It doesn't replace marketing and sales. It doesn't replace product and taste. It doesn't replace personal relationships. And it doesn't replace the customer who wants to have really well-made software. It may increase your ability to compete, but I feel like the changes were like software stocks have dropped like a rock. Those are probably opportunities to buy. And I feel like depending on the stock, you can get some bargains out there.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Detail. It's just not something you can vibe code. And it's so hard to get right. Customers at Citadel, he's not vibe coding something. He wants to buy something and he wants to buy something that works all the time. And if it breaks, he wants to yell at somebody and take his business somewhere else. That's the kind of thing you get out of software. And the relationships matter. Sal, my wonderful Bloomberg rep or whatever it is, you know, those kinds of things Sal software. So I sort of think the panic is most panics aren't really what you expect. Something's going to change, but I think some of this panic is unrealistic. And then, you know, again, going back to like, you know, the Bloomberg example, we have 1,800 news relationships with news companies. And if you vibe coded it yourself, I've seen people do this. They get five. And it's like, well, the trader cares about the $1,713th news source that's going to screw up.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many people try to make the saying it's sort of a Bloomberg killer. Killer is a strong word. But Bloomberg's been this software monopoly for 40 years. And the reason it works is because it's actually very hard software to make and your customer expects. I was just sitting down with a customer, he expects the bond prices when he looks up a bond to be right. And bonds are something that like 90% of these apps like Perplexity Finance, for example, doesn't have bonds. Half of Wall Street or even 60 or 70% of Wall Street's related to bonds. And if you don't have your bond prices in there and you vibe coded it, well, a bond API player takes six months to do a contract. Like these guys are so sleepy. They don't want to talk to you. They almost don't want a new customer. And if you want bond prices and you have to like make sure, oh, when you look up this French bond, it's correct. Like, that's something that kind of taste and that kind of attention.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, nobody knows. But one thing I think is that software is not dead yet. And I think that we're making this financial software. We've been working at it two years. We're sort of still in beta. We have some nice revenue. We're almost profitable. We haven't launched it yet. And it's this sort of.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we see the entropic open AI threatening startups or even very big companies on a seemingly weekly basis. And Lad Gill, the legendary investor tweeted out the other day something like if you're a company in AI if you're an AI company consider getting sold in the next 18 months you're just speaking to the power that these big companies have and i think there's there's also just a broader question as to whether uh the ai sort of platform shift will look like the internet in that application companies will accrue a lot of the value or if it'll look more of like the cloud in the sense that maybe the the hardware layer has has the better better margins and you know like we're seeing with nvidia right now”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, this may sound strange or stupid, but like if it were me, I Give Sequoia a 16Z. Here's a hundred billion dollars. Go invest it for us. But doing buybacks is historically the worst thing you could do. I mean, it really is kind of this admission that you don't know what, you know, you kind of don't know what to do with the capital. You don't know where the future is heading. It's a financial engineer. It's the kind of stuff I do like. It's a very financial engineering kind of nerdy, you know, not that innovative thing. And it kind of like, you know, it's indicative of their business, I think, being sort of like that release new products. It just refreshes the same old products, you know, all the new stuff they did has sort of been bad other than airpods. So I feel like, you know, it's also going to be other companies. You know, Microsoft sort of also sitting on a perch that's not great. I mean, they make OS after don't need OS software anywhere. You make office tools. Goodbye, Kotos. It's kind of like, you know, that's sort of a dangerous perch. I don't think anything's going to happen in Excel, but I feel like, you know, there is a fee.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could, to your point on meta, I mean, you could tell they're a live player by them, you know, in the arena, you know, paying billions of dollars for Alexander Wang, for Daniel Gross, for Nat Friedman. Like Apple's not doing that. They could attract the money to, they're almost sitting on a resource curse of the iPhone, but not willing to make”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have the distribution, but they don't have, they just sort of feel like a pocket protector. They feel like Yahoo in 2000. They feel like it's not cool. It's not interesting. People want to do other things. So we'll have to see if Google will fail or what will happen. Obviously TPUs are an exciting business search never going away in some ways. But it feels like there's some changing of the guard. And moments like this is when the Xeroxes become Xerox and those types of things, those transitions start to happen before your eyes and you don't necessarily feel it or notice it right away, but they do happen. And I don't know what Mag7 is going to become a Lag7, but eventually you're going to get the Lag 7.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No joke. And we laugh at that now, but that's going to happen again. Some of these companies, maybe half these companies are going to disappear. And I certainly think Apple is like one of these things you raise your eyebrow at because obviously it's hard to count them out. It's hard to bet against them. But Apple's one, if I had to pick one that I wouldn't like bet on, you know, I wouldn't say I'm ready to bet against it. But Apple seems like it's now old hat and there's nothing that special or charismatic about the company and their products. It used to be super cool and sleek and edgy. You know, that design in fashion, you have to stay fresh. You have to stay pushing the envelope. You just stay dangerous. And Apple was dangerous 20 years ago. It was new in Nouveau. It's kind of whatever now. And I feel like that's a monopoly that can start to fracture a little bit depending on how other players play. Google is another one where it seems like no matter what they do with Gemini, it just kind of sucks and people don't want to use it.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so hard to lose to the Mag 7. I do think we're going to get surprised. If you look at the history of capitalism and big stocks, you wouldn't recognize most of the Dow 30 from 100 years ago. United Cigar, you know, companies who've never heard of. And American canned.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He could just literally take an open source model and it doesn't, you know, the problem with AI, I think, is that if you're open AI or anthropic, pushing for more intelligence, like going from 150 IQ to 160 IQ, the kind of kids I went to high school with, you know, doesn't make them more interesting. You don't want to sit down with those kids at the lunchroom anyway. You mostly Instagram users and Facebook users, most of their questions are sort of normalish stuff. Nobody's asking the Facebook AI prove the Riemann hypothesis. That's something that mine and all these other guys want to do. But who actually needs that? I think that the average person doesn't need questions that complicated. And it'd be cool to see it happen. But for Zuck, I mean, he's got the distribution and he's got the best product guys in the world, you know, hence the Snapchat battle that he sort of won and stole from. And I think that he's going to continue to do that and win. So I don't know. I feel like, you know.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think Facebook's met us gracing ever. I'm just such a big fan of Zach and this amazing thing is distribution he has. It almost doesn't matter if he makes his AI himself. Like all he has to do is like.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ooh, good question. You know, it's so funny because in pharma, you have this dynamic as well, where it's sort of very hard to sort of lose your long-term edge. Because these businesses are so valuable that they have a hard time falling apart. I thought you were going to ask me the other question, which is a lot easier to answer.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, they're willing to actually tell their investors you're going to have to be really, really patient with this one. Don't expect cursor here.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look at the annual financials. What's the net present value of NVIDIA back in 2020? It's actually the same as the net present value of it with or without gaming GPUs, because ultimately it was worth the wait for that gigantic honky stick. So if you knew 25 years ago, oh, in 20 years, there's going to be a thing called AI and we're going to dominate the hardware for that, you still should have invested. You still would have made it your no less of your biggest investment than as if they had the revenue and the GPU. So I think that this idea of really long-termism, I almost want to think about it like a lab, you know, it's kind of lay open AI sort of thought about their business was we're going to monetize something in AI. We don't know what it is. Eventually it'll hit us and we'll know this is a more directed effort, but I think that there's something powerful about some investors now being willing to wait 10 years or wait 20 years and the fact there are some entrepreneurs out there like S.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 5x or 3x, your investors will probably balk on another round because, you know, ultimately NVIDIA is not staying still. Know your investors, your employees, everyone around you is just sort of going to feel despondent that you're not getting anywhere. Google had the power to live through lots of crap with TPUs. It didn't work. They didn't scale. And finally, they got through every break. They're two, 15 years. So you need to make sure investors. I've talked to some people recently where I said I might need 20 years. Are you ready to sort of like live that through? For most people, the answer is no. And so we're focused almost exclusively on corporates instead of VCs because I think that corporates sort of get that, you know, especially corporates that have been through it. You know, they've been around for 40 years. They get that it's worth it to stick around and wait and look at NVIDIA. If NVIDIA had no revenue, this is a good thought experiment. Zero out all the revenue for NVIDIA Gaming.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of these tricks down were actually closer than we think. But I still think you got to be realistic, no matter how much of an optimism you need as an entrepreneur, you have to be a little bit realistic that you're not going to kill a video overnight and you're not even going to kill 5% of it. It's like look at Grock. You know, Grock, this very small ultra-fast segment of the market. Then you take it all. But, you know, for people that really need very low latency Grocks, it's a decent solution. And that's a $20 billion win. And there's nothing wrong with that. So I think you might carve a niche out that, oh, optics is really good, say for video because video and optics kind of, you know, they're naturally the same thing. So maybe you do that or something like that. And I think that you'll sort of see it. You'll know when you see it. And I think that the key is, in my opinion, is investor mismatch. So the problem, if you go to your investors and you say, I'm going to have something 10x better than NVIDIA next year, well, you better deliver that. And if you don't, if it comes out.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you stay in optics. If you can make a whole LM in optics, then you tape it out and you hopefully get the performance characteristics we're talking about. But actually what's interesting about it is, you know, your question kind of is revealing because what's not well known about this is that guys have been doing this in academics for many years now. So UT Austin showed a optical transformer. Guy at UCLA showed optical nonlinearity.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you have to, you know, we talked about this internally because taping something out is sort of a, you know, to some extent it's a waste of time. Unlike electronics, you can actually set up these experiments in free space. So that's the nice thing about light is like a light lab, you know, an optics photonics lab is pretty easy to set up. I'd say that unless you get a thousand x or bare minimum 100x improvement, it's not even worth taping out. Arrivals are using SRAM and some other analog electronics. I think you have to stay in all optics. The conversion kills you if you go from electric to optical back to electric, back to optical. I mean, you know, you might as well not make the chip, in my opinion. But, you know, folks want to try it anyway. They want to do their best grock imitation. And Grock, you know, is obviously great, great success from an investor standpoint. And so.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That come with scaling transistors, which are well known, and we'll eke out just a little bit more performance out of that. But I think to get a thousand X improvement, you need to do something pretty, pretty different.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quantum is about an aggregate about $100 billion. And so obviously Naveen's company, my company, the other couple of companies I mentioned, why don't we have a market cap of aggregate $100 billion? Why not, in fact, because it's actually useful, the world, nobody wants to do integer factorization. Everyone wants to do metmoles. Why don't we have a market cap of $500 billion? I think we will. And so that's kind of the pitch there. And I know your company is, I think, one of the major investors in this new thing in the Veans company, amongst many others, All-Star list of investors. And, you know, I don't know what they're doing at all, but I understand that the race to make the next computer is on. And some people are sort of half stepping it. Like there's some great companies doing ASICs, which is fantastic. TPUs even are sort of half steps. You're still on transistors and you're still limited by the problems.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, it's not that cool if you understand that computers basically be measured in sort of two ways. You have a thread, number of threads, number of operations at a time, kind of parallelization, which is why Nvidia is so cool. 16,000 threads versus your average computer's 16 threads. And then it's 1,000x, literally 1,000x more threads. And then you have clock speed. And you have basically multiply the two. And clock speed's, you know, in the gigahertz for both of those computers. So you have 1000x speed up with NVIDIA if you can paralyze the instructions Quantum, the fastest quantum computer I'm aware of is a megahertz, which is your calculator is faster than that. And it's literally a thousand times slower than a normal computer it's single threaded. And the only way the tortoise beats the hair is when you have an algorithmic advantage and the algorithmic advantage exists in shores, but it doesn't exist anywhere else. And what's interesting is you have these market caps.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, first, I just want to say you did this epically hilarious debate with somebody on quantum that we'll link to. And, you know, he was a bull and you got into the technology and he couldn't really defend himself there, although I'm sure he's a nice guy. Yeah, yeah. But it just goes, yeah, it goes to show that this is a very complex stuff. Call himself.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End of, maybe not the end of Silicon, maybe the end of transistors. And so there's $10 trillion whether you include all the other hardware coming out, the rest of the ecosystem, et cetera. Maybe it's $5 to $10 trillion in market cap up for grabs. And it's not an area where there's a lot of startups, which is really shocking. Like the amount of agent startups is in the thousands and thousands. I can name all every single optical computing company on my hand. And compared to biological computing or quantum or some of the other alternative computing, those aren't really that exciting. So Photonic is many people I've talked to at OpenAI or Meta and other places. They sort of all agree inevitably photonics is going to be here. And I feel like whether it's five years, 10 years, or even 20 years, it's still worth making that computer because you need to hand the baton off. I don't think Nvidia is going to stay asleep, but I also don't think that, you know, this is necessarily an easy thing to sort of embark on most of the time these bigger companies will resist kind of uprooting themselves.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what's going to happen. So there's neurofoss. They raised 150. There's a company called Flux Computing that renamed to Olex. They raised $250. We're out there. There's a couple of little smaller guys too. And I think that one of us, hopefully all of us in some ways will, you know, and there's obviously unconventional, which has its little opaque exactly what it's doing, but very highly funded effort that raised a billion dollars, I think. I think it's time for a new computer. And ultimately, we're working on the hard parts of this so that it sounds great, but there's a bunch of catches. And one of the catches is nonlinearity is very hard to do in optical computing. We think we figure out a way to do it. The other catch is there's no memory in optics. So we think we figure out a way to do that. So I think that we're going to see a lot of bankruptcies. We're going to see a lot of startups in this space. But I think it's sort of time for the end of Silicon.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Light does mat wolves for free. So you have a Matmull machine in light. God kind of made light to do matmals whenever it diffracts. So you get the speed of light matmal. And if we had an optical computer, I think it would have like a thousand x to a million x performance depending on whether it's speed or speed and energy included. And so like, you know, flops for watt or something like that, flops for joule. So I think there's like, you know, I think eventually Moore's law, you know, Jetson's already cited today. And I think everyone's seen that. But I don't think processor speed is going to really improve at all. And I think just shoving more energy through the system, you know, making bigger systems. These are like the only things we can do. We need to do something. I don't want it to have data centers in space. I don't want to have nuclear reactors in my backyard. And I think that it'd be a lot easier for you just made a freaking better computer. And I think that.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source