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“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%.”

“The interesting thing about large language models is that you can transform any thought in any language, any human language, into software. And this, I thought, is how we bring a billion software creators online.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Today we talk about the Fortune 500, and it takes a ton of employees to build a big company like that. But I think in the future, when AI is helping everyone build their dreams, we’re going to be talking about the Fortune 5000000.”

“The plan editor becomes a plan source. It recursively expands all the different tasks. It goes out and assembles the tools. And these are tools that, as developers, we use every day. There's your code editor, your source control and everything that we're used to.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think the net IQ of the world is about to go up, like, 50 points... The average IQ with AI in your ear at all times is about to go up to 150, which is, like, north of the genius definition. So very, very soon, the willingness to put up with random obnoxious things, like low quality or crappy terms or products that pretend to be something they're not, like, all of that is just getting flushed out very quickly. And companies that have business models that are buried in a fine print of some kind are all in for a very rude awakening.”

“AI is not just a tool, it's a ladder that equalizes opportunity. And that opens up horizons for people that are typically on the sidelines. So I'll leave you with this. Imagine that the American dream, not just in one place, but actually in the cloud.”

“With LLMs, the barrier to entry into an area of programming that you've never done before is nil. This time around, I'm like, well, I can just ask my favorite agent to go research this stuff and set it up for me, and then I can just focus on exactly the functionality that I want and the implementation quirks that I'm interested in. Reconciling this opportunity where coding is fun again and easy again with the need to run a big company is a lot of fun.”

“Computer science is a science... It's also an art form. Like if you read code, or maybe we used to read code for fun, some code is more elegant than other, and you would readily see it. That's a beautifully written piece of software. I'm like, that's kind of garbage, but it does the job. So there's a matter of taste and elegance in programming, and it's also a craft. When you actually look at well-made production-grade code, you can identify if you know what you're doing, like that's a well-crafted piece of software.”

“I think companies that have built software poorly and just sell that software are very vulnerable. The bar for quality of software is going up rapidly. If you really hate some piece of software that you're using and it's just software, it doesn't have some deep sort of proprietary data, proprietary source of value, it will get replaced. Like, there's no reason why not. It's long overdue to get rid of bad software.”

“In the short term, the market is a voting machine, in the long term, it's a weighing machine. And I'm a big fan of reminding myself, if the price is going up a lot, you can overlook that if price is going down a lot. It's important to remember, but either way, you're working for the long term. If you're willing to drop everything and look at the short term, you're joining the group of investors that I said I don't care about. I certainly don't want to do that.”

“Affirm was founded in many ways to fight all of that and destroy the ridiculous and the exploitive... We don't compound interest specifically to make sure that we can pre-price every loan and say you're borrowing $500 and your total interest chargers will be $25 or $0 if somebody else or merchant is paying your interest for you. And for a long time, consumers were sort of like, yeah, you say that, but there's got to be something in a fine print. One of our core values is no fine print to remind ourselves and the rest of the world that we're not hiding our business model in there.”

“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.”

“I think the net IQ of the world is about to go up like 50 points. Like we're surrounded by people—not in Silicon Valley, of course—where the average IQ is still 100. I think the average IQ with AI in your ear at all times is about to go up to 150, which is like north of the genius definition. Very, very soon, the willingness to put up with random, obnoxious things like low quality or crappy terms or products that pretend to be something they're not is just going to get flushed out very quickly.”

“Socialism sucks. It is terrible. The only people who do well in redistribution of wealth are the ones doing redistribution. It's fundamentally corrupt, and there's not enough bad things I can say about socialism. So I think capitalism works exceedingly well, especially when the competition is encouraged and allowed to flourish... We've had thousands of years to evolve a fairly good economic model, and US is most certainly 1A in the right way to do it.”

“Majority of American banks derive a disproportionate percentage of their income from late fees. A late fee was obviously conceived as a means of slapping your wrist and saying, like, if you're going to be late, I'm going to remind you. At some point, someone said, wait a second, that's 100% gross margin product. It's better if you're late a lot, because then I'll make more money, and it cost me nothing to create that revenue line. Affirm was founded in many ways to fight all of that and destroy the ridiculous and the exploitive.”

“Socialism sucks. It is terrible. The only people who do well in redistribution of wealth are the ones doing redistribution. It's fundamentally corrupt and there's not enough bad things I can say about socialism. So I think capitalism works exceedingly well, especially when the competition is encouraged and allowed to flourish. We've had thousands of years to evolve a fairly good economic model, and the US is most certainly 1A in the right way to do it.”

“The thing that's happened with the LLM powered models is you can now go from, I have an inkling in my head to, I'm going to build a prototype to, I'm going to, not necessarily always on your own, but with a bunch of co-conspirators to build something that's production ready in record short time. And if you do know what you're doing as somebody with a sense for how to build software well, you don't need to vibe code yourself to a prototype and then hand it off to somebody who knows what they're doing. You can actually build something amazing and just ship it.”

“The most important lesson is always the team. It is sort of the Alpha and Omega success or failure of a company is the team. And there's an art form to building a company with it. The corollary to the team is the fact that just having a bunch of brilliant people is not actually enough. You need to organize them, you need to give them a mission, you need to give them a way to pursue that mission that feels true to them, but also aligns them all together, which is kind of what leadership is all about.”

“I think companies that have built software orally and just sell that software are very vulnerable. The bar for quality of software is going up rapidly. The, yeah, it kind of sucks and has bad interface, but it really serves an important function and I can't be bothered to hire engineers or build the same thing myself. That excuse is gone. If you really hate some piece of software that you're using and it's just software, it doesn't have some deep proprietary data, proprietary source of value, it will get replaced.”

“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%.”

“The AI seems confident that it's not going to be able to solve this problem with more compute. So it prompts me with an increased budget. Now it's a hefty number, and that's because it's not just going to recruit AIs. It's going to go out and recruit people. It's going to post a bounty.”

“With LLMs, the barrier to entry into an area of programming that you've never done before is nil. I was annoyed at some remote control functionality that I have in my home AV system. So I decided I'm just going to build an iOS app to completely get rid of my stupid remote and have a remote on my phone. Normally, a year ago, I have to learn how to build iOS apps, I have to learn how to interface with this audio video system that I have. This time around, I was like, well, I can just ask my favorite agents to go research stuff and set it up for me.”

“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.”

“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.”