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Tom Hulme

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2024-05-08
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2024-05-08
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  1. “That's an easy one, definitely not announced. We, as you know, we did the series A of Sneak. 2016, Guy Pajani is an incredible founder, worked with him for years. We have just invested in his stealth startup a few weeks ago to be able to sort of back him again is a real privilege. I'm really excited.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “In terms of multiple it was seed investment in Robin Hood, which was 277X. I think $250,000? I think. Yes, biggest dollar return was Uber, which we put $330 million in return billions, and we've had some really fantastic ones like Krishna invested in flat iron at the Series B, that was incredible. Dave did GitLab, that's now a public company that's been brilliant. So I have to say, one of the lovely things is the returns of really beautifully sort of distributed around the team.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think the biggest change of opinion I've had is before having kids I think I would have told you it was seventy five percent nurture and twenty five percent nature. Since having kids you realize that actually it's predominantly nature. People pop out with personalities and our job is to just put them in a position where they can be successful, protect them, support them. And actually I think it's a stretch, but if I had to translate that to our job, I think it's a good reminder that you can't change founders. Like you can help them be better. You can give advice, etc. But this idea that you can just fundamentally change founders, I think, is completely wrong.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I mean, I think naturally there is a sort of winner takes all dynamic naturally because procurement's so tough. Because actually you do need to have all the skills in-house. It's not something you can just outsource to a distributed team and be particularly agile. So there's some structural stuff that means that I think we will get very big companies. I think those companies are doing incredibly important work. And so I do think a lot of the value will kind of aggregate to them.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “No. But I think there are parts of the military that can. And just because it's difficult doesn't mean we should do it. I've been a reservist for a long time, as you know. I think that's important work. And I think it's going to become more important. The geopolitical threats are real surrounding us. And for my kids generation, that worries me more than anything else.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I have to say I am hard to look at anyone that has shaped the world in my lifetime more. What have you changed? Great question. I would say the potential of robotics, I thought of robotics as almost uninvestable for most of my time at GV. We have made investments, some of them being a tough, but they felt very narrow and they've been incredibly specialized. I think the thing that's changed for me recently is actually in the same way as AI historically was specialized and now is generalizable. I wonder whether robots are more generalizable. And so the combination of computer vision, large language models, multimodal, cheaper, componentry, etc. We might see, and I think a lot of smart money has figured this out way before me. We might see the potential in robotics.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah. Was it a good pitch? It was a brilliant pitch in that case. We'd been lucky enough to see him at events when they've unveiled their progress. I went to one actually in California where there were a series of phenomenally talented PhDs and at this point Elon was running three or four companies. I can't remember which, and he was able to go toe to toe with all of those PhDs technically on that business. His throughput and horsepower in understanding the business from first principles completely blew my mind.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Oh my gosh, I've had a few, but I had one for GV in California where the founder brought his life coach, who sat at the room with a moleskin. That one we will skip over. But I would say the most we didn't do the deal. The company was subsequently in the headlines a lot for the wrong reasons. I would say the most memorable one was during COVID. We invested in Euralink. Incredible founders, Elon, Max, amazing. And they shared with us how they were going to do the human machine interface. They've been testing on primates. I have never had so many mixed emotions as in a pitch, but I left that pitch thinking these people have the potential to change the world.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Ah, yeah, it's fascinating to me, and I've never seen anyone share this, but I think there is a correlation between how aggressively people predict AGI is coming and how much capital they need to raise. So you've got Amodi from Anthropic, you've got Altman, OpenAI, Musk, XAI, all of these guys are saying that it's just around the corner and this industry is moving incredibly quickly, then in contrast you've got Zuckerberg at Meta, you've got Demis a Sabbath at Deep Mind, and they're a lot more cautious. They don't need to raise money. And so I wonder, my general bias would be to look to the people that don't have to raise money for their point of view, assuming they're all equally smart. What's the most memorable first founder?”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Oh, yeah, this is something you and I joked about. I still believe this. Like, look, climate change, existential risk, absolutely, AGI, existential risk, yes.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And this is a great question. I think I'd say nothing. Incredible business hardware company founded by Carpay. I love that board. It's truly global. We have insight from India, China, design in Sweden, the design and marketing team in London, and it's all coalesced around that table, and they work together with a real focus on creating value for the end customer, and it's a global customer. I think they'll do six hundred million dollars revenue this year. They've sold three million devices so far. There's hardly any phone company that's done that. And you've seen the press in the last few days. There are a lot of hardware companies that are not selling products. They're selling promises.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So again, I think people early in their career, being in the office is a ridiculously important learning opportunity. You learn the interpersonal stuff. You can shadow people in a way that's pretty hard on a Zoom call. You can speak to colleagues in different areas about the sort of business and the opportunity around the cliche water cooler. All of that stuff disappears. And so I wonder why on earth would someone not want to do that? Now, sometimes it will be because of cost and you have to understand and respect that. But the times when it's actually because they think there'll be more effective by just working from their bedroom don't understand it.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “That's a classic false economy where people say we can have a small office and then we can have a third of the team in at any one time. Much better to have the full office and have all of the team in a third of the time.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I'd first carve out companies that are sort of natively remote. So Dave Monicello, who you know, led our investment in GitLab at the Series A. Phenomenal Investment. Never had an office. They also sit the founder is incredibly thoughtful. He's very careful that all meetings are recorded asynchronously. Everyone can contribute to the board meeting document. They get the whole team together. It's not a great cost saving thing, it just works for them. So look, there's native remote businesses that work very well. Then there's everyone else that was sort of forced to be native during COVID, and I think executed badly, and generally went through this arc where they said, oh, this is really good. Everyone can work at home. Everyone works really efficiently. Then over time, everyone realized actually we're not innovative. The junior people on the team are not learning. People are getting frustrated. Like you and I went for walks during that period, and I remember us joking, that we just became very efficient at our jobs by doing”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Exactly. No, cultural debt is a real thing. And I think it's a big problem after the period we've been in where actually companies got bloated. They spent more than they should. There was less accountability. And it's very difficult to kind of retrospectively put that back in. I think it's one of the reasons you've seen the best founders are quite aggressive in cuts. They never do shallow cuts too often. They see that burning platform as a way to actually shift the culture and maybe move this cultural debt to the side.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I worry about culture debt a lot. And you and I have talked about for a long time technical debt was the thing we were all scared of. I actually think technical debt is almost less of an issue over time, particularly with generative AI, which is actually incredibly forgiving of how you integrate it. You don't have to have perfect systems like you perhaps used to, or certainly not as monolithic. The thing with cultural debt is it's more insidious. You can have in a company sort of culture that evolves that makes it slow moving or negative or cynical, perhaps too top heavy or untrusting.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “That's true. I love that point. I think if you like pointing the organization effort at a specific problem is incredibly important and just running for the sake of it doesn't matter. What I will say, which is just reframing of what you said, is just starting to do something creates data and information. Like actually picking up the phone, launching a product, getting out the door in order to learn creates information. And so you better have a great reason for not doing it.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So this is when I see I talk to founders about a lot. I see a lot of businesses and it's slightly different in consumer, but they will not charge their early adopters. They won't charge their design partners. They won't charge their ICPs. And the problem with that is you don't know if it's valued and generally people don't value what they don't pay for, so you get bad feedback. And in the early stages of a startup, you have to get good feedback from the market, which means fast and accurate. And that customer set has to be representative of where you want to go.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “With hindsight, yes, at the time no. The question is, is the V1 good enough for you to get meaningful feedback? I mean, I've seen V1s that don't even describe what the product did.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yes, and I would say it's clock speed. I think every startup is a series of unanswered questions, and the best founders choose the order in which they answer the questions and they answer them extremely efficiently. And that is basically speed of execution. One of the biggest things that I tell founders is perfection is the enemy of progress. I see founders all the time that just want the perfect solution and they'll never do anything. They'll never release anything. The best founders are pragmatists. They are running the scientific method. I want to answer this question. I'm going to answer it this efficiently and then I'm moving on to the next.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “He was so well placed to understand actually what those buyers wanted and ultimately sold the business to Visa for a billion dollars, like he was the not the ultimate insider, but he had real debt. I am absolutely comfortable with both of those approaches. But my question is for the industry, how much inside knowledge do you need, and if you don't have it, can you bring it in? I think the danger is often founders don't have the humility so they're not willing to learn, and they have to learn everything from scratch, that's madness. If you have the naive approach, then you better bring in specialists that can help you learn fast.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Perfect. That's a great solution. I'll give you extreme examples of both. So we invested in lemonade Series A, wonderful founders. One Shai had done Fiverr product and design guy, Daniel, lawyer had done hardware, and they were going to insurance. Combined insurance experience between those two? Zero. What was their unfair advantage? They understood through Daniel's legal background he knew how to manage a business, they understood the tech side, and they would have an incredible clock speed. They were releasing on a daily basis, whereas that industry is every month. So their unfair advantage was speed and they recruited in depth. They brought in amazing people like Tim who had actually deep industry insurance experience. So in that case, I was happy to invest in the naive approach. Other end of the spectrum, we invested in currency cloud, Mike Lavin, the founder, I think had 30 years experience in FinTech.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “That is a great question, and this is going to be a frustrating answer to someone that probably wants to have a sort of soundbite from it, but it depends And actually, I've got excited about both before, so look, I give you extreme examples.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, firstly, I don't think we need to look five to seven year period because our LP will take a longer view. Secondly, that business is like an extraordinary mutual fund on technology. You invest early and it grows because they sort of develop a first, do a phenomenal job of getting early and growing with the next generation of incumbents. I've seen them do that repeatedly and their execution's been brilliant. Now they had huge amounts of capital thrown at them. They had to actually reduce the OPEX at time. They got more thoughtful about that. But do I believe that Stripe is going to be a hugely bigger business in 10 years than it is today? Absolutely. You don't That's a bet. Ten years' time. We'll come back and we'll talk this”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “that we can sort of I hope in our process at GB we sort of step back from that we move aside the fear and say okay in this moment is this a good investment to make during COVID a deal that I'm really proud of that we didn't really talk about is we invested 100 million bucks into Stripe in 2020 we extended the Series G round but I think that was a moment where actually there was a lot of fear of looking stupid because of COVID there was a lot of fear in the industry and we were able to kind of put that aside and say this is a great business. We invested in 2017. We've seen what they can do. We believe it'll continue growing and in the long run generational company absolutely. So that was an example where I think we did a pretty good job.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “It's fantastic. We should have You and I were talking about fear at the time, and I think fear is a primary driver that actually really wrecks industry returns, VC returns. And I think it goes through waves because it's kind of heard thing fear. kind of ZERP fear was FOMO, fear of missing out, and people were heat seeking into deals, not doing their work. They were investing in things just assuming it would be up and to the right. And if you're a momentum investor and you can get out, that is a strategy. It's just one that I wouldn't be comfortable about. Then I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way. And we now have this kind of falling knife problem, fear of looking stupid. And so people are not investing because they're worried the market keeps going down or there's going to be a down round afterwards. And so that's kind of paralyzed the industry. But I think fear has this effect that actually exaggerates the worst behaviors that influence decision making.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “From Google Ventures. One of the fascinating things about this, like if you look at Microsoft, if you believe it's a sustaining innovation, the value the tech is commoditizing, the value migrates to whoever's got data and distribution, and you say what's particularly well suited to an LLM type approach, it's law. Microsoft is quite well placed. They've got Word that's in the workflow. It's coding. They're well placed. They've got GitHub. It's in everyone's workflow. It's probably in healthcare. They've got Epic in sort of patient recording, etc. They've done a phenomenal job.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Foundation models ninety percent. Application layer seventy percent and in the incumbents, the value going into the incumbents only twenty percent. If you look at the proportion of the Fortune 500 that are using co-pilot, I think it's 60 or 70% I heard last week. It's an extraordinary amount. Like that is a good investment. That is improving productivity. But that has all the hallmarks of a sustaining innovation. So these applications can make an unbelievable difference. The challenge for you and me in our job is actually a lot of the value is going to the incumbents.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, I think the question they're not asking enough is whether these people have experience or the founders have experience of commercializing businesses, iterating fast and creating value. I think a lot of these researchers are unbelievably smart human beings, but they've often been in an environment which gives us confidence they're smart, whether it be deep mind, whether it be meta. Actually, the idea that they can all go out and create highly profitable, fast moving businesses seems ridiculous. And I think the question is only ever asked about our technically strong they are, but if you believe that this is a fast-moving industry that commoditizes fast, you better be able to run fast.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, my colleague for doing London invested in symphesia, which I think is an interesting business. So that is a business that creates synthetic video. They do it into learning and development environments. And there wasn't really an incumbent there. So they've concentrated on building a whole go-to-market business to me is what's important in the application layer. You better have something proprietary in terms of data or distribution. In their case, they're just building an end-to-end enterprise ready solution with security and everything that enables you to spin up the videos. So those are the sorts of things that we're looking for. I like the framework that I think Sam Altman on your pod said, which is the easiest way to look at applications in Gen AI or to cut them is to say to yourself, are they happy or devastated if the model's improved by one hundred X? I've got to look for businesses that are happy they're going to improve by one hundred X. Otherwise, it's just ephemeral in the same way as I think the foundation models are.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “If it's unique in its ability to take agency, then it might be interesting. There's other orthogonal approaches that might be interesting. But if we're just talking about a foundation model where you've got to throw huge amounts of data, hundreds of millions of dollars would compute at H100s like everyone else. It's very difficult to see a return on these investments.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I would struggle to make that investment a day. And it's not because I don't respect the team. My biggest concern at the moment, but if I observe the emergence of what Meta's doing, if I look at the arms race of what the cloud providers are investing in and the sort of Gemini, et cetera, any advantage is pretty ephemeral. And the consumer-facing product that drives, I don't know, is it 50% of the revenue, something like that is not sticky. So to invest in a foundation model, what would I want to be true? I would want to believe that they had some unique approach that made them more defensible. So an obvious one is memory. Actually, none of these have cracked memory yet, but if you have a personal assistant, a chat GPT equivalent, it remembers so that it can actually be applied probabilities as to what you want going forward, then it's interesting.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yeah, that's to date been my thesis as well. It will look more like a utility and the cloud providers rationally are saying we want to provide that utility on our compute and they're going to charge on that basis. And they already are, whether you're on AWS, GCP, anywhere else. I think inflection is interesting. I feel like that deal was almost misreported. I do not believe that Microsoft were buying the pie model. I think Microsoft, a GPU constrained and were buying a cluster of twelve thousand H one hundreds. So I think it was an incredibly smart move by Nadella in order just to lock in a cluster for training. It was just a convenient story for the press to say, oh, they're going to give access to the model. But that model was obsolete months ago. Absolutely no one is queuing to use it now.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “effect like the internet did on many industries, and so as an investor that's frustrating because you want to invest in stuff that persists and completely rebuilds industries from scratch. But I can't really see it. I mean, we found some targets and we've made quite a few investments, but it's not for me the sort of radical sort of shift or opportunity from an investment perspective that we perhaps saw with the internet.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “There definitely has been, because if you were to invest in OpenAI in the ten billion dollar round, there's liquidity in the market, you could sell that for a five X now, and you could have done that over a year. So if you've got a momentum strategy and you believe that firm that you're investing in is going to be at the front of the pack and continue to be, I suspect there's money to be made. But if you're investing in fundamentals, it's very difficult to invest in something that actually is going to commoditize that quickly. In fact, I'd say the best teacher I ever had was Clay Christensen, just unbelievably smart human being. He wrote the innovator's solution. We all know that. And he will talk about, or he did talk about sustaining and disruptive innovations. I think one of the frustrations with Gen AI as the technology is commoditizing so quickly is it's a sustaining innovation. It's actually going to get sprinkled across all businesses to lower costs in call centers or to improve the product in personalization is not going to have a creative distribution.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Result. Lama 3 released last week is already incredible. He's pledged that he's going to invest another hundred billion dollars or so. He's already started to train Lama for that team and their world class. They're formidable competitors. So to invest now in an asset that you think you're going to have to depreciate over the space of weeks or months is very difficult to do. Now we have made investments in Gen AI but more in infrastructure, more in the application layer, more in the sort of picks and shovels to support, but we've not thus far invested in foundation models.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, okay, so there's a few things in it. My first observation would be the technology is commoditizing incredibly quickly, which worries me a lot. So I think I likened when we talked the other day it to investing a few hundred million into a power station. That's the training time. And then you can turn it on and you've got inference coming out the side. That's your power. Now the problem is this is an industry where it's going to take you a few months to build your power station and everyone else is building similar power stations next door with relatively little edge. They're all using the same GPUs. Their marginal improvements. But you basically got a depreciate that asset in these foundation models over a few months. I just can't see it happening. And then now we've got meta coming into the market. I mean Zuckerberg's done an amazing job. He'll have $350,000 H100s by the end of this year. That is 14% of the world's H100s and he's going to open source the”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Maybe not, I hope that we're not sort of participating in that frenzy, but the market's a tale of two cities. It's like anything that's generative AI looks like twenty nineteen, 2020 ZERP. Everything else is a struggle. My own belief is that actually Gen AI is not going to drive enough value in growth businesses that it can justify that investment”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Go back to your point, I understand why he probably recognized COVID, product COVID fit, took money off the table. There are investors that in order to get into the deal enabled him to do that. That was one of their competitive edges is they freed up the founder to take a lot of cash off. I think one of the interesting questions we should all ask is how are the other people in these businesses treated? I don't know anything about that business, so I don't have a point of view, but I do see a lot of cases where an individual will do incredibly well and then others in the team don't. And that sits uncomfortably with me.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I agree COVID. I've got repressed memory syndrome. You probably have as well. I bet you were doing it. You just can't remember.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I totally agree. I mean, look, you look back. I remember you and I walking at the time and the conversation I remember us having, does Hopin have product market fit or product COVID fit? It clearly had product COVID fit. No one was excited to do events online. They were forced to do events online. I remember doing sort of family quizzes on a Sunday night over Zoom, the most dystopian thing I can possibly imagine now. We were all forced to do that. COVID forced to do that.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Our approach at GV is primarily be founder first, and we can take a very long time. We have $10 billion under management, alphabet does not put us under time pressure. We're less worried about IRR than we are absolute returns. And so we focus on kind of generational companies. Actually, our dream scenario is to hold for a long time, a decade, two decades, if you really want to build fantastic generational companies. I think it makes sense. But I always do advise founders, do advise early investors if they get the opportunity to take some capital off the table, I think it makes sense.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, no, I don't agree with it. I think a lot of VC strategy is a lagging indicator of what did work in the past. And the test or the experiment that worked very well in the past is funds with 25 portfolio companies, power law of returns, and one or two return the whole fund and then everything else drives decent return and IRR for the LPs. That has absolutely worked. But just because that has worked doesn't mean other approaches can't. And I think we see from different PE models, we even see from debt models there's other ways to actually be very successful at kind of growth stage. I would not want to say that I would only structure a portfolio that can deliver or return, make investments that could return the whole fund. It doesn't make sense to me. The important thing is have a strategy and stick to it. You made this point in Angel Investing. It's super important. Have your strategy and stick to it. Don't fall in love with one company. Throw your strategy out of the window and then dump the whole.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “I mean, look, it's a problem. We need a multiplier effect. And I don't think it's just VCs because they need to raise more money. I think more importantly, the great thing about significant exits is founders will go on and do something else. And then for every sort of large unicorn that succeeds, it spills out an amazing number of entrepreneurs that are able to swing for the fence because they've got some cash in their bank and they can go for it. You and I have talked before. I think one of the best groups of founders are those that have come out of the rocket ship companies because actually they kind of instinctively know they need to aim at big opportunities and they know how to run a fast growth business.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's option value in intellect, brilliant team. I completely agree with that. And if they're well resourced because they've already got to a $1 to $2 billion business, it's absolutely possible. But oh my gosh, if you look at the”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yeah, that's interesting. Not always. I mean, if you look at the market opportunity, it takes usually a long time to build a $10 billion business. So you need the market opportunity to persist. You need competitive threats not to come in, and you need it to be big enough. Those three things are not always true.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Yeah, basically that doesn't worry me. I think the best relationships you have with founders are more honest with that. And you say these are the things that I would watch out for. This is how I see the sort of balance of reward and risk. I think one of the challenges, it's also easy just to sell to your partnership so you don't have those honest conversations”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Complete conviction that I got it right. And then now we're in a venture capital industry and we see investments and we're supposed to have complete conviction that it's going to work. I can describe a bull and a bear case for every one of my portfolio.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “So we do, and the way we frame it, we ask actually what is the kind of option value in this business. Great founders understand the value of options. Like an example will be most of the best founders I've ever worked with have collected data without knowing really what it might be used for, but they've instinctively known there's option value in it. They know that it might create some value. And so we try and serve a scenario plan by saying, okay, this is the plan. Do we have confidence in it? And then what's the upside? If this goes right, what opportunities might it unlock? And then obviously we reframe it and say, okay, what are the risks therein? Pre-mortem how this might go wrong. And then you get a kind of balance view of what all the outcomes might be. But then look, you and I have talked before. I don't understand in our industry how anyone can have complete conviction on anything. That makes no sense to me. I study physics at university. We would go through a proof and I still didn't have.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah, I think so. And I think it's because we have a sort of bias that whenever we're looking at businesses, we see them on an S curve. It's very difficult to imagine new S curves, but the best businesses will continuously put themselves on new S curves and create new opportunities. So I've yet to see people that do an amazing job of actually talking through what three, four, five S curves might look like for a business.”

    2024-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: GV's Tom Hulme on Why Investing in Foundation Models is like Investing in "Power Stations", The Conventional Wisdom in VC that is BS & Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 255x on Robinhood and Making Billions on Uber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source