BUILD CHIPS

“It's one of those deals that makes sense for both sides... SpaceX has the most amazing data center, but they're not doing a very good job of selling them. They found this company that's in the mother load of all AI markets, which is coding, and the vertically integrated thing just looks a lot more attractive. You literally have a company that's making 3 billion in revenue and spending 3 billion on gross margin, and you have another company that's burning 18 billion; you put them together and the 3 billion gets canceled.”

“There are six leaders with market caps above two trillion... Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, all can buy a startup for $100 billion. I think there’ll be a $100 billion deal in the next 12 months. In all of these boardrooms, they are saying, I want to buy something that is going to actually move the needle for us. If they identify the perfect target, like the LinkedIn of AI, they will do a hundred billion if they have it.”

“This is a semiconductor company, potentially one of the very few startup semiconductor companies in the last decade and a half. The product they make is a big ass wafer scale chip that’s really good for inference because it’s really fast and obviously very optimized for AI. They've gone from niche to mainstream and clawed their way into the mix with AWS and OpenAI. I hope they make a ton of money.”

“Today, if it went public today, you would be fighting them off at a stick at a trillion dollars. You would have a fabulously successful IPO. My assumption is these guys are going to go public in the October Q4 time period, as soon as is humanly possible. Why even pause for breath? You raise a big slug of equity out of the gate, expand the capital base, and get access to convertible preferreds and debt structures.”

“There are six leaders with market caps above two trillion... Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, all can buy a startup for $100 billion. I think there’ll be a $100 billion deal in the next 12 months. In all of these boardrooms, they are saying, I want to buy something that is going to actually move the needle for us. If they identify the perfect target, like the LinkedIn of AI, they will do a hundred billion if they have it.”

“What Mark Benioff is really pitching is an agent fabric. It is the layer that manages all your agents—governance, security, and knowing what every single agent is doing in real time. Orchestration is the nerdy term, but how is an ordinary company without a team of deployment experts going to manage 300 agents running 24-7? They'll go rogue if you don't have a fabric you can trust.”

“This is a semiconductor company, potentially one of the very few startup semiconductor companies in the last decade and a half. The product they make is a big ass wafer scale chip that’s really good for inference because it’s really fast and obviously very optimized for AI. They've gone from niche to mainstream and clawed their way into the mix with AWS and OpenAI. I hope they make a ton of money.”

“Stealth churn is everywhere. I've paid for Netflix for years, but I watch so much YouTube, and on YouTube it’s becoming more and more AI generated content. I’ve stealth churned off Netflix; I’m still paying, but I may only pay for another year. As more folks stealth churn off Canva or Adobe because they're using AI tools, the usage declines faster than the revenue. If your usage is declining, you're hiding.”

“Even though we're making them in Arizona, they go back to Taiwan for packaging. Problem. You gotta get that in America. I think it's thirty percent of printed circuit boards we import from China. Almost all of the chemicals, substrates, input that go into making chips. I'm from China or Asia.”

“This exposes the whole 'SaaS is dead' meme as bullshit. Low growth SaaS is bad, and high growth SaaS is good. If Rippling is growing at that rate, hitting a billion dollars growing at 78%, that’s amazing and compelling. What it really points out is that the real objection to these public SaaS companies is not the model, but that your market is now tapped out and your growth rate is only 10%.”

“What Mark Benioff is really pitching is an agent fabric. It is the layer that manages all your agents—governance, security, and knowing what every single agent is doing in real time. Orchestration is the nerdy term, but how is an ordinary company without a team of deployment experts going to manage 300 agents running 24-7? They'll go rogue if you don't have a fabric you can trust.”

“This exposes the whole 'SaaS is dead' meme as bullshit. Low growth SaaS is bad, and high growth SaaS is good. If Rippling is growing at that rate, hitting a billion dollars growing at 78%, that’s amazing and compelling. What it really points out is that the real objection to these public SaaS companies is not the model, but that your market is now tapped out and your growth rate is only 10%.”

“My view for a long time has been post high school education in America mostly doesn't work. It mostly doesn't work. We can argue with me about it. That's my long hal view. I was a governor who oversaw colleges. A lot of people who start college don't finish.”

“President Biden called me Gov. He's like, Gov, why can't we make everything in America? Likes the President cannot. We don't have enough people. That's inflationary. We don't have enough. It's not a good goal. We don't have enough land, we don't have energy. We should make the most critical things and work with our allies.”

“My biggest lesson from the chips program is when you do something like that, make sure it's bipartisan. It has mostly survived. Actually, now TSMC is making leading edge chips in Arizona the same way they are in Taipei, Taiwan, and they're going to expand, and this administration is like helping, not hurting that.”

“The German industrial base is going to get crushed. Like this is China's play. They run the play over and over again. They subsidize, they dump cheap products into the global market. In this case Europe also Africa, distort the price and it makes it impossible to compete.”

“I think you could see an explosion of new small company and I'm hearing that from a lot of people. It's much easier to start your own business because of AI tools. Yeah, so like now, lots and lots of people make the living with a restaurant or a coffee shop or whatever. I think it's possible. We see a real explosion of online like new services, new online products, because people can start a business with AI.”

“That doesn't work in America in a democratic society, putting tens of millions of Americans out of work precipitously will create the end of democracy will not win the AI race, And so we just got to get to work and be innovative.”

“It's one of those deals that makes sense for both sides... SpaceX has the most amazing data center, but they're not doing a very good job of selling them. They found this company that's in the mother load of all AI markets, which is coding, and the vertically integrated thing just looks a lot more attractive. You literally have a company that's making 3 billion in revenue and spending 3 billion on gross margin, and you have another company that's burning 18 billion; you put them together and the 3 billion gets canceled.”

“Today, if it went public today, you would be fighting them off at a stick at a trillion dollars. You would have a fabulously successful IPO. My assumption is these guys are going to go public in the October Q4 time period, as soon as is humanly possible. Why even pause for breath? You raise a big slug of equity out of the gate, expand the capital base, and get access to convertible preferreds and debt structures.”

“I think we're in a bad place. I don't think we can effectively compete with China economically technologically without allies. Right, They're just too big. They're too big, they're too determined, and so we need allies, including Europe, by the way, including Southeast Asia, including the Global South.”

“It is an existential threat. It will maim and nibble at Figma more and more because normal people can design stuff and get into production much faster. We will bypass designers more and more. The meta question is that no one talked about it: it is an application. It comes up as a full application with sharing, users, hierarchy, and saved assets. We won't want to use grandpa software anymore.”

“Stealth churn is everywhere. I've paid for Netflix for years, but I watch so much YouTube, and on YouTube it’s becoming more and more AI generated content. I’ve stealth churned off Netflix; I’m still paying, but I may only pay for another year. As more folks stealth churn off Canva or Adobe because they're using AI tools, the usage declines faster than the revenue. If your usage is declining, you're hiding.”

“It is an existential threat. It will maim and nibble at Figma more and more because normal people can design stuff and get into production much faster. We will bypass designers more and more. The meta question is that no one talked about it: it is an application. It comes up as a full application with sharing, users, hierarchy, and saved assets. We won't want to use grandpa software anymore.”