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Investing + Tech. Open Sourced. → Newsletter/Podcast | @mollysoshea
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Soren Monroe-Anderson (@soren_ma) says Neros' Millennium One facility has the largest American flag in the South Bay:
"That was really important to us."
"This one is 30 x 60."
"Next facility needs to have higher ceilings so we can go even bigger."
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Neros CEO @soren_ma reveals why it's virtually impossible to completely manufacture a drone without relying on China:
"We've gone way further than pretty much every other drone company in America."
"But I would be lying to you if I said nothing in our supply chain relies on China because the truth of the matter is, if you go down far enough, you will find places where China is the main supplier."
"As an example, printed circuit boards, the manufacturing uses precursor materials that is completely dominated by China. So even if you go to one of these board shops in America that specializes in ITAR, exquisite... they could be making the printed circuit boards for the F-35. I would be almost certain they're using precursor chemicals that come from China."
"It's a massive problem."
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Neros CEO @soren_ma says there's a lot of drone companies demoing products that fail in real battlefield conditions:
"Companies are building capabilities that demo really well, and fall apart in the battlefield."
"A lot of people like to talk about swarming—100 drones swarming together and hitting a target. It's all happening on ranges with GPS, which is not a real thing in the battlefield."
"A lot of companies are demoing stuff that just does not actually hold up in realistic conditions."
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Neros CEO @soren_ma says Gundo is the new Skunk Works:
"One of my biggest motivators starting Neros was the Skunk Works book and the story of Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich and how they built such an incredible program that had such a huge impact on national security."
"It's a tale of a relatively small group of people who are insanely motivated, that worked extremely hard, and did something that had a huge impact for the country."
"You mentioned the group here in El Segundo or South Bay in LA. That is a big part of it for me."
"To pick one of many, @isaiah_p_taylor from @valaratomics, he has been absolutely crushing it. I don't know anyone who works harder than Isaiah, and I don't know anyone who has had such an incredible journey from where he's come from, and all the people who doubted him when he started Valar to now just crushing all of the competition. It's so inspiring."
"We've benefited from having this crazy density of great companies and great founders that we can bounce ideas off of each other."
"It's competitive too. Like, if you see your buddy going faster, then you're like, 'Okay, I need to step it up.'"
"These guys, they prove that it's possible. So I think historic—maybe Skunk Works, maybe Kelly Johnson. Today, it's this group that exists in this amazing community."
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Neros CEO @soren_ma says the biggest misconception with reindustrialization is that we're not trying to reindustrialize.
We're trying to industrialize something that never existed before in America:
"Electronics and drones specifically just never existed in America."
"Reindustrialize is applicable to things like forgings or the stuff that America was really good at in these big factories in the Midwest. Sure, we need to bring that back. But there's actually so much new industry that didn't exist in the first place."
"The misconception is not to look back to history, but actually look forward and realize: how do we do this better than what China is doing today?"
"China figured out how to do everything from America and then improved on it. They iterated really quickly, and they made a better system. America needs to take our ingenuity and make a better system for things like drones."
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Keith @rabois explains his Ketchup theory:
"I still believe that ketchup is really good for you when you're a kid. People who are successful were eating a lot of ketchup when they were young."
"Malcolm @Gladwell also has a chapter on how ketchup is the perfect food."
" I've just noticed observationally that when I talk with some of my friends, I'm like, 'How much ketchup did you have when you were a kid?'"
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David @friedberg says the "great lie of the 20th century" was convincing people to put all of their net worth into one asset: their home.
"When you do that, then the only way to keep Americans wealthy or keep the middle class stable is to keep the price of homes going up."
"And that ultimately leads to a point in time today where young people can't afford those super expensive homes."
"Back in the day, 30-40 years ago, if you got a good job, you could buy a home."
"Today, because we made everyone put all of their net worth in their home, and therefore we had to keep home prices going up to keep everyone's net worth going up, people got screwed."
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"The attention economy is real. Standing out is hard."
Dylan Field @zoink explains why people and companies need to take more risks today than in the past:
"It takes not only human steering and human intent, but it also takes a point of view."
"That is something that people fall down on all the time, because it's kinda scary to have a point of view. Like, a real point of view and to be bold and to take a risk."
"Folks are already internalizing this."
"They're already, from the market teaching them, realizing they have to go take these bolder bets, bigger swings."
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"If the product is special enough, no logo is needed."
— @elonmusk
Figma CEO @zoink mostly agrees:
"I actually think that's right. But also, if the product is that special, then it's probably got enough brand characteristics that it kind of functions as a logo."
"Can you take the Tesla logo off a Tesla car? Sure. But you probably still know it's a Tesla."
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Figma CEO Dylan Field (@zoink): "I'm still shocked that we're in a prompting age."
"It's been, what? Five years since GPT-3 now?"
" And we're still prompting away."
"I think the interfaces for how you interact with models will evolve so much."
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Figma CEO Dylan Field (@zoink) says LLMs are better at math than art because creativity can only be judged by a human:
" You can set up more automatic methods for that, but you still have that human intent."
"Whereas formal domains like math—that's as formal as it gets."
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The best way to avoid jet lag is to fly private:
"The Boeing 787 has a cabin altitude of just under 8,000 feet. In the private jet market, the Global 7500 has a cabin altitude of about 3,100 feet."
"It means that the altitude that it feels like you're at when you're flying is significantly lower than on a commercial airline, which makes a big difference for fatigue."
"There's all sorts of cool things happening right now. We're seeing airplanes that have circadian rhythm lighting—you program your destination, and it'll figure out where you are, where your destination is, and it will change the lighting around the time of day so that you can adjust your body."
— Craft Founder @israelslod
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Bryan Johnson claims travel is 'barbaric' on the body, but wearing this may blunt the effects
Benchmark missed OpenAI, Anthropic, & SpaceX.. yet still built one of the strongest AI portfolios:
Semis: @cerebras
Vertical AI: @WeAreLegora
Horizontal: @SierraPlatform
Developer: @LangChain
Prosumer: @HeyGen
Orbital data centers: @Starcloud_
Plus: Manus, Mercor, Decart, Gumloop, Exa, Reducto, Eigen, 11x, Fireworks AI, & more.
Benchmark GP @EverettRandle says "There was literally no thought of, 'This is the category that we're going into.'"
"It was all founder out.. It was all based on the founder."
"We don't invest in categories."
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“The @Benchmark investment in @Starcloud_ was about the people.”
Thanks @EverettRandle and @ChetanP Puttagunta 🙏🥹
@MollySOShea, @sourceryy
Uber just fixed room service.
No more hotels charging $500 for a pot of coffee.
@dkhos says whenever you're in a hotel, you can now open @UberEats Travel Mode and get food from any local restaurant delivered straight to your hotel room.
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"The benefit of Benchmark is, we don't invest in categories, we invest in people."
@EverettRandle says Benchmark's strategy is " all based on the founder."
"There's zero thought to, 'This is going to be a big category.'"
"It's that this is an unbelievable entrepreneur that is going to put their energy to an idea that they've convinced us is really, really interesting."
"When you focus and have your strategy around that—great entrepreneurs are always in style."
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VC firms are not VC firms anymore.
Benchmark GP @EverettRandle says a lot of "VC firms" have actually become alternative asset managers:
"They have venture products. They are not venture capital firms."
"General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz—those are alternative asset managers, because they have so many products."
"General Catalyst still has a venture product. They also have a growth product, a debt product, a health assurance product, and a wealth management product. Because they're an alternative asset manager."
"As an industry, we haven't done a good job of evolving our nomenclature."
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NEW: The Death of Spreadsheet Investing. Inside Benchmark's New AI Playbook
Everett Randle (@EverettRandle), GP at @benchmark
Why every golden rule of SaaS just got inverted & how AI is rewriting venture investing:
› You can now pass $1B+ in revenue with unproven unit economics..
› Late-stage companies can have much higher upside than a Series C
Benchmark's AI Bets: Cerebras, Manus, Mercor, Sierra, Legora, Fireworks, Exa, Starcloud, Gumloop..
We cover:
› The Disorientation: Scale No Longer De-Risks a Company
› What Happened to the Golden Rules?
› AI Inverted Nearly Every Framework
› New Taxonomy: P x Q x M
› Inference Is the Demand Engine
› Tokenomics: Frontier vs Open Source
› The Liquidity Shock: Reframing the Returns Math
› Benchmark's Model: Founders Over Themes
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Everett Randle, General Partner at Benchmark
(00:58) Coming off Benchmark's AGM
(04:05) The Golden rules of Investing are all gone
(08:58) Who actually has a handle on AI Economics?
(12:57) Why Benchmark bets on Founders, not Categories
(15:31) Brad Gerstner's "Age of Inference" Thesis
(19:07) The most important shift since the Cloud
(23:55) Inside Gumloop's AI automation canvas
(26:40) The Token Maxing problem nobody's solving
(27:25) Ev's "Mom Test" for frontier AI
(31:33) What happens when frontier models get too cheap
(34:44) Inside the new funding playbook
(40:31) Venture Capital became a product, not a firm
(42:35) The Biggest IPO wave Wall Street's ever seen
(49:08) The secret behind Benchmark's wildly diverse bets
(52:54) The mentors who shaped him
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The best way to understand the open-source vs. frontier AI debate:
@EverettRandle says ‘Your mom.’
Ev explains his "AI Mom Test"
"What is the amount of queries or things that she needs out of AI that can't be done by a really, really cost-effective open-source model?"
"Now, it's 100%."
"There's nothing my mom actually asks of her AI products that needs to be done by the frontier or even a near frontier model."
"What we're seeing in the market right now is that people are willing to pay a huge premium to access frontier intelligence."
"But there's a growing portion of tasks in the economy and within enterprises where you just don't need a frontier model, and oftentimes you don't even need anything close to a frontier model."
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"At Benchmark, the main thing we do well is partner with entrepreneurs extremely early."
@EverettRandle on why Benchmark invests in Founders instead of categories:
"What is at the center and core of all these companies, no matter the category? They all have amazing entrepreneurs driving them."
"The Benchmark model since our founding has been very entrepreneur-out versus theme-in."
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NEW: The Death of Spreadsheet Investing. Inside Benchmark's New AI Playbook
Everett Randle (@EverettRandle), GP at @benchmark
Why every golden rule of SaaS just got inverted & how AI is rewriting venture investing:
› You can now pass $1B+ in revenue with unproven unit economics..
› Late-stage companies can have much higher upside than a Series C
Benchmark's AI Bets: Cerebras, Manus, Mercor, Sierra, Legora, Fireworks, Exa, Starcloud, Gumloop..
We cover:
› The Disorientation: Scale No Longer De-Risks a Company
› What Happened to the Golden Rules?
› AI Inverted Nearly Every Framework
› New Taxonomy: P x Q x M
› Inference Is the Demand Engine
› Tokenomics: Frontier vs Open Source
› The Liquidity Shock: Reframing the Returns Math
› Benchmark's Model: Founders Over Themes
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Everett Randle, General Partner at Benchmark
(00:58) Coming off Benchmark's AGM
(04:05) The Golden rules of Investing are all gone
(08:58) Who actually has a handle on AI Economics?
(12:57) Why Benchmark bets on Founders, not Categories
(15:31) Brad Gerstner's "Age of Inference" Thesis
(19:07) The most important shift since the Cloud
(23:55) Inside Gumloop's AI automation canvas
(26:40) The Token Maxing problem nobody's solving
(27:25) Ev's "Mom Test" for frontier AI
(31:33) What happens when frontier models get too cheap
(34:44) Inside the new funding playbook
(40:31) Venture Capital became a product, not a firm
(42:35) The Biggest IPO wave Wall Street's ever seen
(49:08) The secret behind Benchmark's wildly diverse bets
(52:54) The mentors who shaped him
Show more
Benchmark GP @EverettRandle: Companies staying private for longer means investing in a late-stage startup could have more upside than a Series C.
SpaceX is the perfect example:
"My first investment at Kleiner Perkins was SpaceX. It was at an over $100 billion valuation."
"Peers and friends at the time were like, 'Are you gunning for a 2.5x? How much upside could there possibly be?'"
"What ended up being true for SpaceX was, you had this thing called Starlink that had started a couple years before that and had really started to scale. That was like a rebirth of the company."
"The vast majority of the business is their consumer broadband business and B2B broadband business via Starlink. It's not even a launch business."
@elonmusk
Show more
NEW: The Death of Spreadsheet Investing. Inside Benchmark's New AI Playbook
Everett Randle (@EverettRandle), GP at @benchmark
Why every golden rule of SaaS just got inverted & how AI is rewriting venture investing:
› You can now pass $1B+ in revenue with unproven unit economics..
› Late-stage companies can have much higher upside than a Series C
Benchmark's AI Bets: Cerebras, Manus, Mercor, Sierra, Legora, Fireworks, Exa, Starcloud, Gumloop..
We cover:
› The Disorientation: Scale No Longer De-Risks a Company
› What Happened to the Golden Rules?
› AI Inverted Nearly Every Framework
› New Taxonomy: P x Q x M
› Inference Is the Demand Engine
› Tokenomics: Frontier vs Open Source
› The Liquidity Shock: Reframing the Returns Math
› Benchmark's Model: Founders Over Themes
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Everett Randle, General Partner at Benchmark
(00:58) Coming off Benchmark's AGM
(04:05) The Golden rules of Investing are all gone
(08:58) Who actually has a handle on AI Economics?
(12:57) Why Benchmark bets on Founders, not Categories
(15:31) Brad Gerstner's "Age of Inference" Thesis
(19:07) The most important shift since the Cloud
(23:55) Inside Gumloop's AI automation canvas
(26:40) The Token Maxing problem nobody's solving
(27:25) Ev's "Mom Test" for frontier AI
(31:33) What happens when frontier models get too cheap
(34:44) Inside the new funding playbook
(40:31) Venture Capital became a product, not a firm
(42:35) The Biggest IPO wave Wall Street's ever seen
(49:08) The secret behind Benchmark's wildly diverse bets
(52:54) The mentors who shaped him
Show more
