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

“So I'm starting a sort of a hardware startup. So I was shorting these stocks quantum computing stocks. And I had to learn computing. Quantum computing is really useful for one algorithm, Shor's algorithm. So unless you're a code breaker and I don't know of any corporate code breakers, there aren't really too many.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even Google are just sort of like, yeah, it's just software, man. Our job is to sell it. You know, it's not that big of a deal. Meanwhile, he's like, I am Spider-Man. I must be Batman. He wants to be a superhero. And it's like, you know, obviously he's selling software really well. But I think the theatrics are kind of ridiculous.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Corporate versus a sovereign. And certainly, if you look at some sovereigns like Brazil, J&J bonds do yield less than Brazilian bonds. They're riskier. They're more likely to default than J&J. And part of that comes from this, again, super governmental. Like JJ, in a sense, is its own country. You know, it has employees. It has 100, a couple hundred thousand people. It's got a lot of revenue. It's bigger than the country I come from called Albania. So in a lot of ways, Anthropic in some ways is going to is sort of going to be its own entity. And this is sort of a nation, sort of network state kind of thinking, corporate state in some ways. And, you know, with all that revenue and all that power that comes from having a powerful piece of software, I could see that sort of be getting to somebody like Dario's head of thinking about, oh my gosh, with great responsibility comes great power. And it's sort of like over, you know, obviously way overwrought. Whereas people, I think at OpenAI and other companies.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think you ever say anything. I mean That the idea that there would be some super governmental authority is a little scary. You know, I used to back in the hedge fund days when the markets were shaky around 2008. I actually asked, I would ask some hedge fund friends, would you rather buy bonds in Johnson& Johnson or bonds in the U.S. government? And it's a very interesting question because in some ways, at the time, it seemed like the U.S. could default. It could the financial markets could collapse. Johnson Johnson is not going to collapse. anywhere in the world where there's consumer health care, pharmaceutical, and med tech. They did all three. Every part of healthcare, you know, every country in the world buys Johnson Johnson. Dollar can go worthless. Jane J will survive. United States of America would not, at least financially. Now, obviously, the US is very resilient. It's the greatest country on earth, et cetera. But at the time, there was a question as to whether bond yields would be better for a high quality.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was really confused by the Anthropic DOW incident about a month ago now, why there was so much support for Anthropic on this. To me, it felt as obvious as like a bullet maker saying, hey, we're only going to sell you these bullets, but only if we can help influence how you use them, you know, separate from U.S. law. I'm definitely simplifying it, and I'm sure we'll get some defenders to come on the show at some point. But to me, it kind of felt obvious that we should sort of leave things to private companies shouldn't be dictating foreign policy. I get their concerns about domestic surveillance, but we have laws for that to protect us from government overreach. And it just doesn't seem like the realm of private companies to get into. What am I missing there?”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's kind of the greatest marketing trick, but I don't think it's in great faith. And, you know, I do think to some extent these guys are true believers of the Doomer hypothesis. And so it's hard to tell what's real and what isn't. It just conveniently also good.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taken the lead or something like that. I mean, it's pretty far fetched. Now, having said that, obviously, we're super impressive product, really great people that work there. I think Dario is not my favorite guy. You know, obviously incredible entrepreneur, beautiful business he's made. But the whole, he tried to scare the world by saying AI is going to kill you. It's going to take over the world. Nobody really believed that. It's nonsense. He says, well, let me shrink that down a little bit to, oh, the AI is going to hack you. And everyone's like, oh, well, that could happen.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And OpenAI, I think, has figured this out and wants to sort of boost their ASP or whatever dollars proceed. And so they're working their way upstream. But I think the traditional VC entrepreneur advice would be don't rinse your customer if you can't help it. And I think that for anthropic, for whatever reason, they want to price through the roof with all these overages. I mean, people complain that two prompts eats up their entire allotted amount. And so I think if OpenAI did that, they probably could get their todays enterprise revenue to something like 100 billion. I know some people would be very surprised to hear that, but I think that's the case. And then on consumer, the same thing with ads, right? So they might have, you know, and again, this sounds preposterous to anybody listening, but, you know, if they were steady, if they did the same monetization effort as anthropic, their real revenue right now would be about 200 versus their 30. So I think this idea that anthropics”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so just obviously disclosure my wife sat OpenAI, she's one of the first people there, so I have a bit of a bias. I have a bias against Anthropic as well. So it's kind of like dual bias. But basically just trying to be objective. If you monetized ChatGPT, both enterprise and consumer fully, you'd actually have, I think, quite a lot more revenue than today. So just case in point, my financial software company, we have about 10 licenses to Anthropic. And it's supposed to be 20 bucks a seat. We get a bill for $1,000. And we're like $1,500. And that's, you know, that's good five to seven X kind of what we ask for. And OpenAI could do that to their customers too. Their customers will pay it. They don't really care to bargain either way. But if you try to ring every dollar out of your user, that has some adverse consequences, I think.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to Scar or wound or bleed a little What actually matters in AI right now? Better models or better businesses. A few years ago, the focus was intelligence, who had the best system, benchmarks, and breakthroughs. Increasingly, the real question is economic. Who captures the value, how it's priced, and where the bottlenecks are. At the same time, we're hitting limits. Compute is getting more expensive, and new approaches from photonic computing to specialized hardware are becoming more necessary. That creates a tension. Software is easier to build, but harder to differentiate. Meanwhile, industries like finance and biotech still require deep expertise and real-world validation. In this episode, I try to understand where the real leverage is shifting across AI, hardware, and pharma. I speak with Martin Shreli, American investor and businessman.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nuclear reactors in my backyard. And I think that it'd be a lot easier for you if you just made a freaking better computer”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's $10 trillion with All the other hardware coming out, the rest of the ecosystem, et cetera, maybe it's five to ten trillion dollars market.”
2026-04-23 · a16z Podcast · Martin Shkreli on AI, Pharma, and What Actually Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source