EMBRACE AI

“Every generation has these existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always and and now it's AI. Then there was this invention called the Haber Bosch process where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom. Suddenly, population skyrocketed.”

“We've already seen in just the last couple of weeks this insane shift in AI where people don't have to run models in the cloud anymore. They can run models on their desktop at home. So there's no longer, like, a dependency on Google or dependency on, you know, pick your favorite hosted model provider. I can download an open source model, and there's plenty of great models. I can run it on a Mac computer in my house.”

“In the West, we have so much more to lose than there is to gain. In China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from 3,000 to 30,000 in just a couple of years. I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by 10x, and everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities. And the cities are like the future. Like, it's been an extraordinary trajectory.”

“All technology shifts go through a phase of diffusion. Meaning, they have to start somewhere. It's not like we turn on a switch, and suddenly everyone can build an Etsy store or a Shopify store. But, like, eventually, every technology commoditizes. That's what's so amazing about technology is it, like, it's always diffusing. Like, this new innovation finds its way out.”

“And now, CAR T therapy is making its way into more and more cancer treatments. And it is like almost a hundred percent, like, success rate in blood cancers when it works. And so it's becoming this thing that goes from millions of dollars to 1,000,000 to 500 and pretty soon to 50k, 20k, and eventually 5k. And that ends that disease.”

“In the coming years, over two million small businesses will change hands or close their doors as Baby Boomers retire.”

“American Operator pairs retiring owners with high-agency operators, along with the capital and know-how to build a thriving business.”

“Should talented young people think twice about traditional careers and pursue ownership opportunities instead?”

“New AI tools make small cohorts of people dramatically more productive.”

“Will believes SMBs are a great AI hedge, while also having unique upside as new AI tools make small cohorts of people dramatically more productive.”

“One lesson that I've drawn from all of these discussions is that really the first priority for investors should be simply to survive and stay in the game, even in extreme conditions, instead of fantasizing about getting rich quick in the short term. As Matt once told me, you want to be structured to participate in the march of mankind, but to survive the dips along the way.”

“He introduced me to this notion that life is actually more complex than the sort of simple games or truths that I was trying to unravel and that much of truth is unapproachable. And in fact, it wasn't until I was in college and many years later reading other works that I realized that this was a sort of a whole field scientific methodology.”

“I became pretty interested in Karl Popper who wrote about the notion of falsification... and I remember Fish's work when he talked about the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk being something that you can narrowly quantify with statistics and uncertainty being where you don't even know what the range of distributional possibilities are.”

“I think despite the fact that I had a really fortunate childhood in terms of being very happy and being exposed to a lot of thinking and life experience, we didn't have a lot of basic necessities. And so I think there was a motivational force of wanting to live a more comfortable life, not for material purposes per se, but for a sense of personal freedom, not feeling encumbered by one circumstance.”

“As a child, I always liked puzzles and trying to crack the code... I think he could see very clearly that I like to get to an absolute truth, like the proof of a mathematical equation. And he introduced me to this notion that life is actually more complex than the sort of simple games or truths that I was trying to unravel and that much of truth is unapproachable.”

“Every generation has these existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always and and now it's AI. Then there was this invention called the Haber Bosch process where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer. Boom. Suddenly, population skyrocketed.”

“We've already seen in just the last couple of weeks this insane shift in AI where people don't have to run models in the cloud anymore. They can run models on their desktop at home. So there's no longer, like, a dependency on Google or dependency on, you know, pick your favorite hosted model provider. I can download an open source model, and there's plenty of great models. I can run it on a Mac computer in my house.”

“In the West, we have so much more to lose than there is to gain. In China, GDP per capita skyrocketed from 3,000 to 30,000 in just a couple of years. I mean, imagine seeing the average person's income in a country go up by 10x, and everyone's moving from farms to villages to cities. And the cities are like the future. Like, it's been an extraordinary trajectory.”

“All technology shifts go through a phase of diffusion. Meaning, they have to start somewhere. It's not like we turn on a switch, and suddenly everyone can build an Etsy store or a Shopify store. But, like, eventually, every technology commoditizes. That's what's so amazing about technology is it, like, it's always diffusing. Like, this new innovation finds its way out.”

“And now, CAR T therapy is making its way into more and more cancer treatments. And it is like almost a hundred percent, like, success rate in blood cancers when it works. And so it's becoming this thing that goes from millions of dollars to 1,000,000 to 500 and pretty soon to 50k, 20k, and eventually 5k. And that ends that disease.”

“One lesson that I've drawn from all of these discussions is that really the first priority for investors should be simply to survive and stay in the game, even in extreme conditions, instead of fantasizing about getting rich quick in the short term. As Matt once told me, you want to be structured to participate in the march of mankind, but to survive the dips along the way.”

“He introduced me to this notion that life is actually more complex than the sort of simple games or truths that I was trying to unravel and that much of truth is unapproachable. And in fact, it wasn't until I was in college and many years later reading other works that I realized that this was a sort of a whole field scientific methodology.”

“I became pretty interested in Karl Popper who wrote about the notion of falsification... and I remember Fish's work when he talked about the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk being something that you can narrowly quantify with statistics and uncertainty being where you don't even know what the range of distributional possibilities are.”

“I think despite the fact that I had a really fortunate childhood in terms of being very happy and being exposed to a lot of thinking and life experience, we didn't have a lot of basic necessities. And so I think there was a motivational force of wanting to live a more comfortable life, not for material purposes per se, but for a sense of personal freedom, not feeling encumbered by one circumstance.”

“As a child, I always liked puzzles and trying to crack the code... I think he could see very clearly that I like to get to an absolute truth, like the proof of a mathematical equation. And he introduced me to this notion that life is actually more complex than the sort of simple games or truths that I was trying to unravel and that much of truth is unapproachable.”

“Since then, in the last two years, I'd say it's about 70% of my investments are AI. And had I not rejoined KV, I think I would either have missed the whole wave and been completely irrelevant or been reckless.”

“I always said I prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical polite. Being very direct saves a lot of hassle, and once you have that culture, nobody's guessing at what you think.”

“In 40 years that I've done Venture Capital, I've not once called myself a Venture Capitalist or an investor. I always say I'm a Venture Assistant to entrepreneurs trying to build companies.”

“While he was on the board of Square, he taught me a lot of things, including the most important precept of the team he builds, the company he builds. It’s the natural fit for how the style of KV translates through my brain.”

“Strong founders almost always select for the best feedback they can get, and also know how to say, no, thank you, I disagree with you. I think that's a really, really important characteristic.”

“It was like one of those plays where like five things had to happen perfectly at the same time. They send the two guys rushing at him, right? He's got two teammates wide open, 50 feet away. UConn practices all the time, they know, oh, either he thinks we're going to foul or not. If he starts to throw to the wide open guys, we're just jumping up like this. And they were like synchronized swimmers. The way they both went up at the same time tipped it. But then the kid had to make a 38 foot shot.”

“There's just no precedent for somebody playing 29 minutes a game, playing about 67, 68 games and winning the MVP. And that's where we'd be with Wemby. He'd be around 65, 66 and he'd be 29 minutes a game on a minutes restriction for a lot of it. You could argue he's been the most impactful guy in the league for the last 10 weeks, but SJ has either been 1, 2, 2, 1, 2 for the entire time and he's on the best team.”

“It’s a wire to wire number one seed for the Thunder. It's another year in which a lot of the supporting cast is injured for good parts of the season. And it's a guard shooting 55% from the floor and being a plus defensively. Like it's just, it's outrageous. It’s on par with Jordan Magic picking MVP season. So if the Spurs were able to pass them and get the number one seed, I'm ready to have that conversation. I just don't think OKC is going to let it out.”

“The big thing is, he, there was like a character reinvention in a fun way, where they became more villainy, which I think kind of weirdly helps the case, because I was like to think of the MVP years like, what happened that year? Like 30 years from now. What happened that year? Oh, what was that year? And this was like, oh, it's the year SGA went back to back, got better than he was the first year, and got a little villainy.”

“It’s a boring argument to make and it feels like you're finding the right hair to split to swing an argument. But it's 350 more minutes that SGA has played than Wembe. And Luka is like 500 something more minutes. 350 minutes is like seven full NBA games. Even if you think Wembe's per minute value or contribution is a tick higher than Shays, and it's actually hard to find any statistical evidence that is true. But let's just say you believe that it's not 350 minutes difference worth of impact.”

“Constraints are not the enemy; they are the catalyst for creativity.”

“Constraints are not the enemy; they are the catalyst for creativity.”

“It was like one of those plays where like five things had to happen perfectly at the same time. They send the two guys rushing at him, right? He's got two teammates wide open, 50 feet away. UConn practices all the time, they know, oh, either he thinks we're going to foul or not. If he starts to throw to the wide open guys, we're just jumping up like this. And they were like synchronized swimmers. The way they both went up at the same time tipped it. But then the kid had to make a 38 foot shot.”

“There's just no precedent for somebody playing 29 minutes a game, playing about 67, 68 games and winning the MVP. And that's where we'd be with Wemby. He'd be around 65, 66 and he'd be 29 minutes a game on a minutes restriction for a lot of it. You could argue he's been the most impactful guy in the league for the last 10 weeks, but SJ has either been 1, 2, 2, 1, 2 for the entire time and he's on the best team.”

“It’s a wire to wire number one seed for the Thunder. It's another year in which a lot of the supporting cast is injured for good parts of the season. And it's a guard shooting 55% from the floor and being a plus defensively. Like it's just, it's outrageous. It’s on par with Jordan Magic picking MVP season. So if the Spurs were able to pass them and get the number one seed, I'm ready to have that conversation. I just don't think OKC is going to let it out.”

“The big thing is, he, there was like a character reinvention in a fun way, where they became more villainy, which I think kind of weirdly helps the case, because I was like to think of the MVP years like, what happened that year? Like 30 years from now. What happened that year? Oh, what was that year? And this was like, oh, it's the year SGA went back to back, got better than he was the first year, and got a little villainy.”

“It’s a boring argument to make and it feels like you're finding the right hair to split to swing an argument. But it's 350 more minutes that SGA has played than Wembe. And Luka is like 500 something more minutes. 350 minutes is like seven full NBA games. Even if you think Wembe's per minute value or contribution is a tick higher than Shays, and it's actually hard to find any statistical evidence that is true. But let's just say you believe that it's not 350 minutes difference worth of impact.”

“Self-awareness is a problem. We've arrived with a sense of self-awareness by a process of evolution that doesn't really care. Obviously, care I'm using loosely there because evolution doesn't care at all about anything besides its just continuation, propagation. But the experience of consciousness and self-awareness from the first-person perspective is not central to the reason for why self-awareness and consciousness arrived in the form that humans experience it.”

“As a self who is aware of that self, we attach to that self, we attach to the ideas of that self, we attach to people and things and our desire to make sense of our perception and understanding through all of the concepts that we form by nature of having that degree of awareness. And yet, reality in existence is fickle, chaotic, uncertain. We are going to lose everybody and everything through time or distance, decay, age or illness or death. And so, we find ourselves in this sort of cosmic ocean, where the waves are crashing on our heads constantly.”

“I think a lot of people have this sense that the more that they learn about themselves, the more difficult life becomes. That there's a kind of enjoyment, freedom. There's a freedom in naivety, would be a way to put it. And that the less naivety that they have, the more challenging the world seems to be. Complexity and responsibility and self-doubt and self-esteem issues come in. This tighter and tighter spiral, this ever-increasing resolution that you look at the world with, I think to a lot of people, feels like a personal curse.”

“Once you start worrying about something or once you start thinking about something, that can of worms is fully opened and you can't, you can't close it. You have to figure out how to deal with it, how to move forward. And I find that the best way to deal with those sorts of cans of worms or those tunnels is forward, not back, because backwards, that end is closed. In terms of the tunnel metaphor, you can't return to some form of yourself, some version of yourself that hasn't already wondered, questioned, pondered, or become concerned about those sorts of things.”

“If you continue on that path, you get to a point where you become more comfortable with the confusions and the uncertainties. And you don't get better at justifying them. You don't get better at dealing with the problems of being a conscious entity in the world. But you get better at recognizing that the lack of answers, the lack of stability, the lack of rigidness is par for the course and par for the beauty of the course.”

“The central banks and the governments cannot afford a recession because of the debt levels... they will provide liquidity into every single hole.”

“AI agents are going to need a way to pay for things, to transfer value, and they’re not going to have bank accounts; they’re going to use crypto rails.”

“AI is the ultimate deflationary force. It drives the cost of everything towards zero, leading us into an era of abundance.”