YouSaid · the spoken record

Vince Hankes

lines on the record: 50
first: 2023-05-03
most recent: 2023-05-03
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

“Hopefully, we'll be talking about some amazing AI companies we invested in that created lots of value for us both. But I think we have a lot of ambition at Thrive as a firm. And I hope to be a big part of us building it and ultimately going and backing some of the next transformational companies, but also building our team and maintaining this amazing culture that I think we have and attracting some of the most talented people that want to go invest in these kinds of companies to come work with us. And so I hope if we talk again in five years, we're talking about those companies. We're talking about the people on our team. And ultimately, we're really excited about all that stuff.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so many lessons. It's hard. Josh is an amazing person. This is not about investing, but I think with Josh, the biggest lesson is really that to be successful, you don't have to compromise on all of the things that are important that are not your career, your family, your friends. Josh, one of the most amazing parts of being around him is his warmth and empathy and his priority of his family over everything else is so obvious when you spend time with him. I've respected that so much about him and I think it's even changed the way that I prioritize how I run my life.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The person that stands out that I've learned so much from is Eric Fishria. He's on the benchling board. He's on the board of this company I work with called Airplane. Eric is, I think, just an incredible blend of has the operational instinct rigor, but also is fun to be around and he's able to land his messages in a really effective way with entrepreneurs. And he also just has a really great balanced perspective on being commercial and understanding how all of that works interplays with the strategy of the company. I found that perspective to be something that I'm continually learning from as I'm listening to him. And when you find those kinds of people, I think you just want to surround yourself with them.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto stands out. We talked about peak marketcapin.com. I think crypto's peak market cap for tokens was like 3 trillion, somewhat similar. The most iconic company that people talked about was a fraud. I think like we're going to look back on that, particularly from an investor lens and say there's these hype cycles that lead to massive speculation. And sometimes even the things people think are most real are just not.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not for the rapid fire, but one thing that's become clearer as we've kind of gone into this more difficult environment to operate in is in the good times, we probably over attribute to teams and products how good they are. And in the bad times, you can't just blame everything on macro, but I think it makes you reflect on the overattribution you probably did in the good times. And one thing I've changed my mind on is you got to be more balanced about how much credit you give to the momentum of a company from the market environment versus the actual execution they're doing and know that there's the balance there and good execution doesn't always mean that it leads to great momentum. Sometimes great momentum is also”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can. I don't know him personally, but Nat Friedman, who's now focused a lot on AI and I think has his own fund. I really respected some of the stuff that I've seen him go do. And I would be certainly interested in putting money in his fund.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short answer is just reading anything. I think for me, I like to try to subscribe to lots of different angles of reading. So sometimes it's podcasts on topics, sometimes it's newsletters, sometimes you go find the blog focused on the developer to go learn about the thing, most importantly, like learning about the history of things is really important. All this AI stuff is happening right now. And some of where I've been reading is trying to trace the key figures from all the way back to like 1980s in AI to today. And so for me, it's really just about variety. simulate the personas, simulate different people that are in the ecosystem and go learn about them. And wherever you can find content on that, I'm willing to read it.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be a part of, we've been able to establish that kind of ground with whoever is most important in that process or the team. And when you do that, I think those things become obvious. And the decision is less about all these other variables in the process. And it's much more emotional because they want to work with you.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only as good as your next investment, Harry. And I've still got a lot to prove. So it's hard to say we've won. But I do think an important part of winning and just understanding how to embrace kind of this culture of making great investments is you've got to figure out how to be authentic to yourself and map that to how you go win. You know, what a founder might be attracted to for me might be different than you, Harry. It might be different than the next investor that's listening to this podcast. And so you can't just apply someone else's style and say, it's going to work for you and you're going to win. You got to try to figure out how to map what's really authentic to you and evoke that emotion in the entrepreneur and get them bought into why that could be a really fruitful partnership for them. And it's hard to do that. You can't do a lot of those things at once. You can treat a transactionally. You've got to invest the time. There's no substitute for the time. The things I look back on that were the most exciting and rewarding for us.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grade looks like and the engagement looks very whimsical relative to deep workflows and integrations. And so we shouldn't value this like a highly recurring software business. We should value it like a consumer subscription business. And there's merit to that. But ultimately, because we were so much in this one-dimensional mindset of enterprise software, we missed what was so special about the company, the learning for me is just you can't walk in biased about what you're looking for out of the metrics of a company or what the product should result in metrics, you should walk in and try to have a very open mind and say, do these metrics explain the qualitative of the business that I'm so excited about and reinforce why it's special? And if you think those things are true, I think then you should lean into it a lot more and try to really get to the guts of could it be a great investment? And I see this a lot with investors when you get too pattern matchy on why companies should be the way they are, I think it leads to a lot of mistakes.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made lots of mistakes. The one that I think stands out the most to me, or at least comes back to me a bunch in my psyche, is when I was at Tiger, I flew out to Sydney and spent a bunch of time with the Canva team in person. And obviously now people know about it. It's a remarkable company. At the time, it was much smaller than it is now. And at the same time, we were so focused on investing in enterprise software as an emerging category at Tiger. And so once we were spending time with Canva, I very much, and this is early in my career, but I very much let the pattern matching and the DNA of what I was thinking about of a great enterprise software company creep into us looking at Canva. And the learning, I think, just to distill it down to something is every company is unique, even within the bounds of enterprise software companies, they're unique. And we took this lens of what a great enterprise software company was. We retrofitted to Canva and we said, okay, well, the churn looks a lot higher than what”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing that enables us to make this decision is we have this single small team that thinks extremely creative about how the world works. And we are ultimately trying to concentrate our investments in the best products that are out there in the world. And so when you simplify it down to that and we allow this autonomy and focus to happen on a single team across the entire investment cycle from early stage all the way to growth, we are enabled to go find these kind of iconic companies. And we're young in our career, obviously, but we also, we can appreciate when these kind of transformational technologies come around. And certainly this was the most transformational thing I've seen in my career and being able to lean into that and not be afraid that if it goes wrong, we're going to get fired or if it goes wrong, we're going to be pushed down in the firm. I think having that psychological safety, that enables a firm to do it. And I think we have that at Thrive.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we had the same level of excitement that we have in most investments. We don't have a culture where there's this kind of sharp elbowed mentality or people feel on edge for making investments because prices are high or checks are really large. We have a culture where we support each other and we have a growth mindset and learn. And so if this ends up not working out, I don't think we're going to look back on this and put all the onus on one person or two people that made a decision. I think we're going to look back on this and say we got there as a team. It was the right thing at the time. But here's the learnings from it and here's how we're going to adapt our lens and course correct in the future. It is intimidating and it's nerve wracking sometimes to write large checks and investments, but in the right team and culture, this is how we enable ourselves to make these kinds of transformational investments. And frankly, I think there are a lot of firms that could not have done this because their organizations are not set up to make these kinds of big decisions.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's less about throwing it out the window, and it's more about putting it in context. A financial model is a tool to help you make a decision. You need many tools to make a decision. It's less about, is that the only thing we use? And we throw it out the window, and it's more about what's the weight by which we put on the financial rigor and model as the tool to make the decision. I think for us, there aren't that many iconic companies that could create it. And so no iconic company, at least that we've been a part of, was it clear and obvious in the early days of that technology? They always get priced well ahead and they look cheap in hindsight because they defy the gravity of the model. And so it's kind of the quintessential humans think linear and the best things happen exponential. We have to understand, and going back to being level-headed, when do our psyche or heuristics break down in an investment decision making process? And when they do, we need to compensate them with a different tool in our toolkit.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rely on for a lot of investments we do and hold the tension of what could go right, think creatively, understand how this could look like the most transformative things. And if that happens, again, we're talking about search potentially getting disrupted or something that enables workflow automation for hundreds of billions of dollars spent on different jobs and categories out there. And even now, we didn't know this at the time of the investment. But with ChatGPT Pro and the traction that's seeing, maybe that won't be the durable revenue engine for the company over time. the velocity with which that's ramping. You know, Kareem, my partner Kareem has a way of saying this, the scalability properties of what they have built are so good that we'd rather bet on the compounding upside of that scalability than sit on the sidelines because once it's clear, it'll get priced up very quickly. And so we ultimately decided to lean into that.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly had a discussion, a heated discussion around it. We have a very team oriented firm, and so we disagree and commit once we make decisions and we make decisions to the team and we live by that. No one person makes a decision. And the price here was high just on an absolute basis. It doesn't matter what company you're investing in at the prices that this round was done. You're talking about very upper echelon type outcomes to justify good returns. But I kind of come back to the intangible it's really hard to understand the pace of adoption of these major technologies. In any numbers I would put on paper for you would look insane. You would look at them in a spreadsheet and tell me there's just no evidence to support this. But then you look at these iconic technologies and the great ones all follow that insane curve. And so the balance we try to hold, I think this makes thrive a really special firm is we're able to kind of separate ourselves from the kind of quantitative rigor that we've”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a solvable problem. There's information out there, there's experts out there, regulators, I've been impressed with how up to speed they've gotten on crypto and they've really taken time to learn about it. And sure, they're going to make mistakes, but ultimately that gap is solvable and it's got to start the dialogue between the people working closest on AI and these regulators. And it might take years to get to a solution so people got to be patient. But this isn't an unknown. This is something that you guys can work together on.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I do think trying to let people build it and understand it is important. And poorly designed regulation on a technology this early is not going to be effective for anybody. And we've got to find the middle ground.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to speak for the company on anything because I know this is a topic that's out there in the mainstream. I think regulation will come to AI and it will be necessary. I don't doubt that at all in my mind. I think it has to be done in partnership with the companies that are building because regulation for the sake of regulation is not going to be what solves the problems people are concerned about. You've got to go understand the nuances. You have to understand the technology. And so I would hope that other companies building an AI are also working with regulators to understand what is the technology and help educate them to get to the right decision. I do think there's kind of some negative stigma going around open AI on regulation and security and safety. And in my view, I think they're being pretty proactive. As an example on GPT-4, we saw the demo in the fall. They didn't just release the product then. They took, I think, four or five months to test and learn about safety in the edges of the model. And then ultimately released it to the world. And so they're not going to get it perfect every time.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or these vector databases that are allowing you to store information. And so things specialize. Our reaction, it's not that hard to say I have a friend and mentor of mine that I spend a lot of time with who says there's only two questions that matter for a company. Who is the customer and what is the product? And you'd be shocked at how many folks can't really answer that question with clarity. And if you can answer that question with clarity, everything else about the business stems from there. And so if you're really answering that question, you're struggling because you think in two weeks from now, there's a chance that the customer doesn't care or the product won't have any value. That's hard to build a company around. And so in any of those environments, I think you'd rather just wait for there to be more clarity than try to keep firing investments into that market.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard. And I think at the early stage, you know, we think about investing in founders first and foremost. You want extraordinary people in really great sandboxes and those folks will be able to figure out how to pivot and adjust and iterate to take advantage opportunity. In this environment, if you told me, would I rather be in the sandbox with the grade founder experimenting and iterating or sitting on the sidelines, I'd rather be iterating, even if things changed a bunch from underneath you at the early stage. But that said, I think you can't make every investment without knowing what's going to happen. So some things, there is an obvious evolution that makes your business less interesting than it was six months ago. If you think about where we were on infrastructure companies nine months ago, there were all kinds of companies branding themselves as ML ops or these end-to-end solutions for AI. Now in this environment we're in now, there's specialized companies that are doing individual components of infrastructure stack, whether it's Lang Chain on connecting all these tools and stitching them together.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to believe it's going to accrue mostly to the application layer. I think if you think about infrastructure companies as platforms, if you think about the software market as the relative value of AWS and Microsoft and Google Cloud versus the software companies built on top are all of the internal software tools built on top, I think it's probably an order of magnitude to one. So I just have to believe where value gets created to end customers is where it will get captured. And the nice part about the infrastructure business is they're effectively toll roads on that whole ecosystem and applications might compete more aggressively with each other in OpenAI or Amazon or the infrastructure provider might be able to clip a coupon on it that's really valuable and we might capitalize it at high multiple. But I have to believe that there's going to be a lot more value in the new experiences and applications than the infrastructure.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business. But if you're creating something that's totally a different user experience that no incumbent has today, I bet on startup 10 times out of 10 in that case.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's too early to call. Maybe that's a cop out answer, but to put it in context, if you go look back in time at these big technology cycles, they are great moments to create new categories. And so maybe that's a better lens to look at it through. Where will new categories get created? Where being an incumbent or being a startup won't matter? And if you look back at the dot com, Google, PayPal came out of it, Google about finding information. PayPal about a bank online, social came after. Facebook was connecting all these people online and Twitter was the town square for broadcasting information. Mobile, the answer wasn't Salesforce was going to build mobile CRM, and that's where all the value was. The answer was you put a computer in everyone's pocket, door dash and Uber came out of that because there's geolocation, the ability to have connectivity. In my view, what we're looking for, if I was to answer that question, is yes, if you're going toe to toe right now with an incumbent on their home turf and their shipping, I think it's a hard bet to take the opposite side of our.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PowerPoint. They're rolling out of the other products. Adobe's got the content creation in their product already, even though big startups like Notion, those folks I've been so impressed with how much they've shipped in their product so quickly. And so if you're a startup, I get that you have the advantage of speed, but you need a multi-ear execution window to be able to take advantage of all that product you can ship quickly. If these big companies are able to ship this quickly, they've got so much distribution, so much talent. I just think it's going to be very hard to compete with them.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's hard to be dismissive of these companies. If you think about where the best talent in AI is right now, I think it's open AI. And then I think everyone would tell you it is Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon. And maybe there are folks that have kind of dripped their way into the STARP ecosystem. But by and large, the talent is so clustered in these big tech companies. And so I get it that they're tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to navigate these giant organizations they've created. But let's not also kid ourselves. We've talked about this maybe outside of the context of open AI. up level it to AI we work with lots of startups that compete on things like presentations or content creation what's scary to me right now is if you're a startup large companies are shipping product the kind of canonical examples where that oh the big incumbent can't move and they're slow footed and you got years to execute before they do something Microsoft 200,000 person company they've shipped ai and being AI empower”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elephant in the room is big tech companies. This is not something where they're sitting flat footed. Facebook, Google, even Microsoft. I know they're great partners opening.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The convenience of putting these things together such that it's not just text, it's now text and image or video and audio all through one interface. That's complicated. And again, it's not to be dismissive that the model doesn't matter in terms of accuracy or size, but it's to say that people are going to optimize for companies, builders are going to optimize for the inputs that allow it to be much easier from the build and much easier.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a question we talked about a lot. I think part of it we're already seeing the evidence, in my opinion, where commoditization of the core model output is not really what people will make decisions on over time. I'm sure there are lots of companies that give similar search results to Google, but the reason these companies get built up to scale is because the ecosystem around them grows. And you're even seeing this. They launched plugins about a month ago and ChatGPT has taken off and taken the world by storm. I think it's the fastest company in 100 million users ever. And so even if the raw model does get competed against, there are maybe companies like Google or Facebook or Microsoft or some of these startups that can compete on that. I do think, again, the dimension by which people are going to think about this in five years from now, looking back isn't going to be about the commoditization of the model and the raw output. It's going to be, oh, the ecosystem around the model has become much more robust such that you can do a lot more with the model than just get text outputs.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ones I work with, I don't want you spending time building infrastructure and scaling open source models. I want you just getting your product out there with lots of value to your customers. And I think OpenAI is quickly figuring out the cost curve, which is probably the biggest competing interest against that. They put out 3.5 turbo, which is, I think at least one, if not two orders of magnitude less expensive than before. In my opinion, I'd bet on these ecosystems to scale the infrastructure. And ultimately, that's becoming more important the decision factors.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Model and who has the lowest cost model to these new dimensions, which is if you're going to build a company today, Harry, you don't want to have to think about the scalability of it or the reliability of the infrastructure or supporting all of that stuff. If you use an open source model, you've got to go figure out all of these infrastructure problems. And so now if you talk to OpenAI and you think about what they're spending time on, it's how do you support this onslaught of scale that has come into their system? And that's infrastructure and engineering problems. It's the same thing we talked about in cloud 10 years ago. I'm sure there were banks out there saying, you know, we're not going to move to public cloud because we can run all our infrastructure ourselves and do it really well. You would never have told a startup 10 years ago to go run your own infrastructure if Amazon was there doing it for you. I think we're kind of getting into this world now where sure there are lots of open source models and they can be used for great things and some companies will choose that path. But by and large, for the vast majority of companies, particularly ones that have scarce resources, which are many”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, obviously, these are my opinions, not the companies, just to make that clear to everybody. I don't think I would characterize OpenAI as one model to rule them all. And obviously there's all kinds of talk right now about it being closed source and the model should be open source for the value of the community and all of those factors. But I'd say actually if you give the company credit for this stuff, which they've released, they have done a lot in the open source and contributed back to the community. Clip was a model that they put out there that helped a lot of the image generation open source models. Whisper was for audio. They open source the inference framework called Triton on top of GPUs and CUDA to ultimately drive more efficacy and scalability of inference. And so they have done a bunch of that side. They obviously have kept the core GPT model behind an API and paywall. I think thinking about it is this entirely closed ecosystem in my mind doesn't really give credit to what the company has done on the open side. Founders, we at least talk to are choosing their model has quickly changed from who's got the biggest”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experiences like that, that's what gets us out of bed. These are the kind of things that create new categories, new companies. That was what a lot of the discussion was. And maybe that sounds like less precise to people. And they think it's a little bit too finger in the air. But I think for us, a lot of this is instinct mapped with why it's a really great business.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, as these news technologies scale, it's so hard to be precise about a TAM. And so more of what we got into the psyche of thinking about is if you looked at other big technology movements, how did they scale? The iPhone went from a million phones a year kind of post-launch to 100 million in five years. AWS took six or seven years to get to $100 million of run rate, but they went from $100 million to $10 billion in six or seven years. Google went from nothing to $10 billion in the first six years of monetizing. Obviously, this is rarefied error we're talking about. And these are three of the most transformational companies on the planet, but the technology, if you really think about it and the zeitgeist it's captured, it is of that elk of the transformation it can have of the world. And so for us, it's less about thinking about the exact TAM and it's more about if we think about what the world's going to look like in five or ten years from now, how are we going to look back and say, wow, I can't imagine the world without this kind of thing when you have”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of investors get tripped up on trying to be so precise on TAM and market and defensibility and the moats around businesses and trying to map that all to price. And those are so important in investment decision making process. But when it's so early in the technology cycle like this, it almost is a little bit more of a venture mindset where there are going to be 50 reasons you can say no and we're not going to have answers to every question, but we need to really think about the things that can go right. We're not talking about building the next unicorn or decacorn. We're talking about disrupting search or Google. I mean, that's a trillion dollar opportunity. Sure, I can't put a TAM around ChatGPT, but I can tell you, like, we're not talking about a small prize at the end of the day. And so I think when we say it's not obvious, if people aren't thinking about it in this lens, they're thinking about it in the box of what is this chat interface do? And oh, those use cases aren't that valuable. And I think it does take a higher level of creativity or imagination to ultimately.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there were a lot of people that said no. As much as I like to think we want to really competitive deal, it was not obvious to everybody. And even now, I don't think it's still obvious to everybody, even folks that use the product.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we really first started focusing on the company maybe 18 months ago because there were a number of startups that were really rising with software products with these kind of tools that you could use to do marketing copy or you could create blog posts with them. I think many of these companies, we spent a bunch of time with them and we kept coming back to the fact that they were thin user experiences on top of this cool thing, which was this model, which really no one talked about, at least not mainstream 18 months ago. And so that triggered us to go spend time with the company. And ultimately, maybe in the classic Sam kind of way, the way we kicked off the round was he did almost like a closed demo with lots of investors on a couple of calls of the technology they were working on and ultimately GPT-4. And we were on that call like many other investors. And I think I remember getting off the call and Josh was also there and we looked at each other like, wow, like the way companies are going to get changed is going to be incredible. Software is going to look so much different.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Core primitives of AI. We don't know them all today, but we can try to figure out what some of them are, and we can really try to understand products. And there's obvious benefits to those things today. Obviously, all the search that's coming with ChatGPT and the LLMs, but also just like companies that allow you to trigger actions without having to do 20 clicks or, I mean, for your show, I'm sure you're using AI in some way to edit or create content or something like that. The marginal cost of content production has come down a lot with these tools. I think when these are the foundational questions you're asking because of technology shift, it forces every company to think about what could happen to their business over the next five years that would be really disruptive. Or how should we be thinking about redisrupting ourselves to ultimately take advantage from the platform? And all the boardrooms I'm in and many of the founders I work with are thinking about that question.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out after a financial crisis, and it was all about take this centralized financial system and make it decentralized. Allow people to take their money anywhere. Don't let the government insert themselves in the financial ecosystem. And really, like, you had to believe in that as a concept to take all of the trade-offs of using crypto. As a consumer, it was a pretty bad user experience. And so when we think about other hype cycles, I mean, if you go back to even the dot-com bubble, when that ran up, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco were the top three technology companies in the peak of the dot-com bubble. They were all infrastructure related in some way. And they were 50% of $3 trillion to market cap in the hype cycle. So people really latch on to these companies and they can run for a long time when people believe. And speculation feels more speculation. And so at the end of the day, you know, if you invested in Microsoft in 2000, it would have taken 15 or 20 years to break even on your investment. And so it's hard to really time and predict hype cycles. And so we ask ourselves, what's the”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the question I think every investor is probably asking themselves right now, or certainly the ones I talk to. And it's the quintessential question of like, do you sit on the sideline and be patient and stay disciplined? Or do you jump in on the gold rush? Because if we don't get in now, we're going to miss all the seed in Series A companies that create tens of billions of dollars of value, which understandable. I think there's a reason why we're in the business of being optimist in inventure capital. And I think for us and really thrive in general, we try to get into the psyche of why are people so excited and less about chasing the next deal and more about what's the core value to the customer? What's the product? What's happening? Crypto, obviously, had an amazing run and I think has kind of pulled back a decent amount. We've been comparing, contrasting. How much is AI potentially the thing people are latching onto like crypto, maybe for the marginal investor a couple years ago versus how much is it real? I think just use crypto as an analogy. It was very ideologically driven. Bitcoin came.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emotion, it allows you to focus on the core a lot more easily. But that said, I think you do need to trust your gut and you do need to be emotional and react that way. And so I wouldn't say it's all about being just this kind of robotic level-headed person. You need to figure out when are the types to do that and one of the times to lean into your instinct.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think part of it is you're a byproduct of your environment. I think for me, I've gone through a bunch of different waves in my career, and that's helped me understand what volatility looks like, feels like. And so I don't think he just become level headed as a person. I think he kind of build into that psyche over time. Someone said to me once, which is a line that I've been saying to the team a bunch internally, is things are never as good as they seemed and they're never as bad as they appeared. And I think just keeping in mind that the rest of the environment around you does react to these peaks and troughs of your emotion and the market and the volatility. And ultimately, in good times, people overextrapolate, in bad times, people under extrapolate. If you maintain this kind of more balanced approach, I do think it helps you hold more clearly what are we ultimately looking for in solving around for given investment or person or situation. I've just found that it's not productive to necessarily get caught up in the emotions. You got to try to think clearly. And if you can remove that noise from the volatility.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you got to telegraph how you're going to make decisions with them and make sure that they get there alongside of you. They don't feel like you're superimposing things top down on them and they don't feel like they're getting surprised in a left field because if they feel that mutual level of partnership with you, I think it's really actually pretty easy to have trust with founders.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about this as a team from our culture. A lot of when you join the Thrive team, the focus is how do you build trust with the organization? And trust is one of these things where in great organizations it can be given by default. In many organizations, you have to earn trust. I think we have a culture in Thrive that definitely people get a lot of trust by default because of how small our team is and how autonomous our model is. For me personally, I actually had really great investor that you guys would know told me something that was interesting, which is trust with founders is actually just being very predictable. People want to not feel like they're getting surprised by how you're thinking. They want to understand how you think, how you're going to react and feel like they understand you. And that ultimately kind of breaks down these boundaries between people and allow you to have some mutual trust and empathy with each other. And so I think with founders in particular, when we talk about building trust, it's like any partnership. You've got to increase the reps, get in the water in the trenches with them. And they have to understand how you think. And ultimately,”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone's motivators are to actually unpack and understand. We talk about this a lot in founder assessment. And I just like you're saying, I believe that we're all a byproduct of these accumulated experiences. And I'm sure have had a lot. I grew up in Michigan. I've got three brothers. I've got two parents that are divorced. And so there's lots of things in that I'm sure manifests into who I am today. But I'm sure like a lot of people that are listening or listening to your show, I'm trying to figure out who I am. And I'm trying to figure out how that impacts the decisions I make and how I react to what I'm seeing as I go through the world. And I think for me personally, the motivator is just maintaining this mindset. How do you maintain the steepest slope possible that you're learning on? One of the things I've grown on a lot over the last eight years of my career is I think when you start, you take a very solo mentality to doing things because the ship on your shoulder, you want to accomplish things. And so you do that really on your own. But over time,”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you empathize with the entrepreneur? And we focus much more on the product and the customer, and ultimately how does that manifest itself into a business? At the end of the day, we're looking for the same thing. I was looking for a tiger, which is iconic market leading companies that are going to generate great returns. I think every investor wants that stuff. But to make it tangible at Tiger, I would have asked a question if you were the founder and I'm trying to figure out who your customer is. I would say, who's your ICP? Or like who's your core customer? That's a very investor lens. At Thrive, the way we'd ask that same question is if I'm a SDR on your sales team and I'm trying to qualify a prospect, what am I looking for? At the end of the day, it's really the same question. You could even argue that the way we do it at Thrive is less efficient, but I think it shows a much deeper level of empathy with the founder. And it's a very different mindset.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I feel really lucky to have started my career working with Lee's. I credit a lot of where I got started to working closely with him. Tiger also is in the news a lot more recently, but the firm's been around for more than 20 years. And if you look at how it got off the ground, it is very much in these kind of hedge fund roots. Chase Coleman, who started the firm, he was in his mid-20s. He was really young. He had this hedge fund mentality, mindset coming out of Tiger Management post the dot-com bubble. And the way we thought about investing in companies was very financial. look at the P&L and understand deeply how do the numbers tell the story of what the business does and how does that ultimately make a good business a great investment i learned a lot just from the financial rigor of doing that but what's interesting is when you contrast that to what we do at thrive and how josh has built the firm we started from the roots of where josh was which was a founder he was the same age as chase when he started thrive but ultimately he was trying to build a startup and so the mindset was very much”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first company he handed to me was a software company. And so I spent the first three years of my career with him looking at lots of software companies and trying to really find what were the next generational big companies there. Lee ended up leaving Tiger and I was also chasing Airtable at the time and the folks at Thrive, Josh and Miles, had led around to the company. And what I've learned from Thrive is always be recruiting. One coffee chad led to another coffee chat and about four years ago, I ended up joining the team of Thrived.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started my career like many folks. I studied in accounting and undergrad. I went to a big bank out of school, which was Goldman. And in a lot of ways, going to these big banks is like doing an MBA. It's a two-year program for the most part. And if you go there, you want to work on these really complicated big companies. And most of what I worked on, where that was that. It was things like AT&T and Verizon or actually Dell announced it was going to merge with EMC at the time. And so they shipped us down to Austin and we worked on carving out a bunch of software companies to go finance that big transaction. And after doing that for about 18 months, I ended up wanting to do something different and I got staffed on Flipkart, which is this e-commerce business in India. And lo and behold, a largest shareholder was Tiger. And so I worked pretty closely with the folks at Tiger on Flipkart for about three or four months. And as I was going to leave Goldman, the stars kind of aligned and I ended up joining Tiger to go work really on private company investing for the Sky Leaf Fixel. As luck would have it.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember getting off the call, and Josh was also there, and we looked at each other, we're like, wow, like the way companies are going to get changed is going to be incredible. Software is going to look so much different. That kind of transformation is just so rare in our job, company after company. I think OpenAI is quickly figuring out the cost curve. They have done a lot in the open source community on regulation, security, and safety. I think they're being pretty proactive.”
2023-05-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The OpenAI Memo: Why Invest? Is it too Late to Catch OpenAI? Are OpenAI's Models Truly Defensible? Does the Value in AI Accrue to Incumbemts or Startups - Application Layer/Infrastructure? What Happens with Regulation? with Vince Hankes @ Thrive · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source