Invest Like the Best
@InvestLikeBest • 39,578 subscribers
Conversations with the world's best investors, founders & domain experts / hosted by @patrick_oshag / part of @colossusmag
Videos
Gokul (Gokul Rajaram) explains why utility-based software companies like Zendesk are more exposed to AI than systems of record like NetSuite, and why public markets aren't distinguishing between the two: "The software companies that should be the most worried right now is where they are pricing the product based on utility. Zendesk is a good example. Instead of paying for 50 Zendesk seats, you can pay for 20 and I can have 30 AI agents sitting next to Zendesk. For these companies you need to change your pricing model to be based on outcome. It's going to be hard for them to stay public. The companies that are less exposed are ones based on data that has been collected and captured over a period of time. ERP is a great example. There is no compelling reason for someone to put their career at stake by ripping out NetSuite. NetSuite has more time to build AI agents on top of it because they have the data, they can train the AI agent on top of it and bundle it. I think the public markets do not distinguish between these two types of companies." (Jan 2026)
Invest Like the Best62,966 views • 3 days ago
Claude is Walter Cronkite for the stock market. Michael Mauboussin talks about how a breakdown in diversity leads to bubbles and crashes. Gavin thinks Claude might be causing that right now. ”Everyone I know in the public equity investment business, whether retail or institutional, everything immediately, every piece of news gets fed into Claude—Claude, Claude code, sometimes a Claude agent. Claude is probabilistic. There's probably not that much variation in the way it's interpreting this news. People talk about the fragmentation of media and how it used to be like Walter Cronkite was the only voice of truth, and now we don't have that anymore. It's like Claude is Walter Cronkite for the stock market, and everybody just believes whatever it says.”
Invest Like the Best335,089 views • 1 month ago
IB chat is one of Bloomberg's strongest moats. People pay $25k+ a year for a terminal in large part because everyone they need to talk to is already on IB. Gabriel Stengel on building the same thing for agents: "Bloomberg's strategy was, offer a little bit of data to get in the door, build all the analytics and workflows on top that someone would need, and then provide the exchange and the communication platform where you can actually transact in a bunch of asset classes that before was pretty opaque. Bloomberg Messenger. For us, it's use a little bit of AI to get in the door, build out the full workflows, go from co-pilot chatbot to full autopilot tool, and then provide the communication channel between counterparties so that if I have agents that can autopilot do the work, I can actually transact for you. I don't need to build the communication channel for humans to transact, I need to build the communication channel for the agents to transact across these investment firms. Think about what is the system that would allow a large private equity firm to feel comfortable having an agent negotiate a deal on its behalf. You need to replace email, you need to replace the data room providers, you need to replace all the governance and calls that happen on top. There's a huge amount of software to be built out."
Invest Like the Best27,802 views • 4 days ago
Sam Altman on VCs: “The number of investors that actually show up and try to help you is unbelievably small. Josh Kushner (Joshua Kushner), absolute MVP investor, unbelievable, has worked around the clock for what feels like years to help us. He's the only investor that I could point to that is proactively incredibly helpful all of the time. The constant, just relentless all-in support is surprisingly rare…but I think founders really love that and it actually moves the needle.”
Invest Like the Best173,985 views • 2 months ago
Matthew forecasts an unprecedented natural gas shortage starting in 2028. He names four winners if he's right: gas producers, midstream, nuclear, and solar. (1) Natural gas producers in the U.S. and Canada should be clear winners, especially those with future inventory of wells to drill without infrastructure constraints. "Expand Energy is probably at the top of that list. They control 70% of remaining core Haynesville wells. The stock has dropped. The assets have not changed. It has some of the highest quality rock in the country." "Choosing the specific companies with real, rather than perceived or merely disclosed, high-return well inventory will matter. Ask to see engineered future wells on a map. Ask for the timelines." He also names $CRK, and $RRC ranks first in Appalachia. "Range has significant room to grow production and materially grow returns to investors." (2) Vital midstream assets should be well-positioned to benefit. "Natural gas infrastructure development has lagged the entire 'powering AI' thesis, the imminent 20 Bcf per day growth in supply, 20 Bcf per day of approved LNG project growth, and more than 5 Bcf per day of natural gas-fueled generation growth. The systems strategically positioned to grow throughput and deliverability will win." He names $KMI, TC Energy ($TRP), and Pembina ($PBA). (3) Large-scale nuclear is the only scalable path to avoiding acute baseload electricity shortages. "There's no bridge fuel other than solar and wind, because currently natural gas is the only flex fuel to get us to when we can bring on nuclear. Large scale nukes are the only solution that makes sense, which points us primarily to the AP1000 Westinghouse units. Westinghouse is deeply undervalued within Cameco today." "SMRs are a band-aid on a bullet wound. A nuclear renaissance is coming." Ha names Cameco ($CCJ) and $BWXT. (4) Solar and batteries are critical to the reliability of the U.S. grid. "Solar assets stand to benefit from a windfall. The marginal plant's fuel price is rising while sun costs the same. Residential solar is really one of the only ways to protect yourself from what you pay for electricity at your house once gas gets really tight. We think residential solar grows exponentially from here, even without tax incentives." "That margin expands. The market has not priced it." He names $XIFR and $CWEN at utility scale and $RUN in residential.
Invest Like the Best159,427 views • 2 months ago
In May, Gavin Baker (Gavin Baker) said capitalism will solve the energy shortage unless regulation gets in the way. A PE infrastructure investor told him the gating factor used to be energy and chips. Now it's zoning and approvals. Sarah Guo (sarah guo) largely agrees. "I was talking to the leader for infrastructure at one of the hyperscalers earlier in the week, and he's like, there was nothing that was gonna move the needle for us at sufficient scale before 2030. Americans and entrepreneurs have been able to build new technologies and new capabilities very, very quickly in the past. I think it is a regulatory problem and an alignment problem. If you want to build data centers in New York, you need to convince the people of New York they should want data centers there. I don't think we lack the technical and entrepreneurial capability to build abundant cheap energy for the data centers."
Invest Like the Best64,013 views • 26 days ago
Gavin Baker (Gavin Baker) says the disaggregation of inference can extend GPU useful lives from 3-4 years to 10-15. That may single-handedly save private credit and reduce the financing rates for GPUs, which will drive demand and help finance the build-out. "The disaggregation of prefill and inference is going to be amazing for the useful lives of GPU and may single-handedly save private credit. Private credit is in pain from these SaaS loans. But there's a lot of private credit in GPUs too. They were underwriting that to 3-4. The disaggregation of inference means that these GPUs are going to have 10 or 15-year lives. The AI skeptics are like, "Oh, these companies are all cooking their books. The useful life of a GPU is only a year or two. The useful life of a CPU is only four years because the rapid technological change." No. What rapid technological change has done with the disaggregation of prefill and inference is you can put a Cerebras system or Groq LPUs effectively in front of a Hopper or even an Ampere, use that Hopper and Ampere for prefill, and extend the useful life of that GPU until it melts. This is going to be really good for the whole private credit industry. It's gonna help finance the AI build-out. Because if you can start to finance GPUs at 5% or 6% instead of – I think CoreWeave's lowest financing was low sevens – that actually mathematically changes the cost to finance this build-out."
Invest Like the Best211,336 views • 4 months ago
Palantir alumni have gone on to found an unusual number of successful companies, and the talent density inside the company remains incredibly high. CTO Shyam Sankar on how they think about talent: "How did Bruce Banner become the Incredible Hulk? It wasn't progressive overload. It was a near fatal dose of gamma rays. There's absolutely an element where we're taking people and just irradiating them. You're not sure if they're going to come out the other end. A lot of environments don't have that by default. Really talented people are highly uneven. Particularly for high achieving people when they're young, they misattribute what their superpower is. They think it's this thing they do that requires a fair amount of effort, and therefore they get a dopamine hit when they succeed. Superpowers are effortless. This thing that's effortless for me, other people who are really smart can't seem to do. All of your contributions to the world are gonna come from your superpower. Everything else is basically a waste of time. There are some weaknesses you have where you're six standard deviations below average. It's not something you can work on. The only strategy for Superman around kryptonite was to avoid it."
Invest Like the Best116,876 views • 2 months ago
SK Hynix recently reached a $1 trillion market cap. SanDisk started the year at $35B and is now worth $230B. Dylan (Dylan Patel) on why memory prices will still double or triple from here: "People are like, the memory story is overplayed. No, you don't get it. DRAM will double or triple from here still, because that's how much capacity is required. Memory can only grow capacity low double digit percentages a year. 20-30% a year, even less for NAND, a little bit higher for DRAM. Even though the demand signal was very strong at the end of 2025, the memory companies immediately started reacting. None of that incremental capacity really gets here until 2028, even if they wanted to build as fast as possible. So the result is memory prices have gone through the roof. They're going to double and triple again. DRAM, especially. And they have to steal capacity from somewhere else. And the only way to steal capacity from somewhere else in a capitalist economy is demand destruction via higher pricing." Publish date: April 23, 2026
Invest Like the Best105,321 views • 2 months ago
SpaceX reportedly accounts for ~45% of D1 Capital's venture and private equity book. At a $1.75T IPO valuation, that stake would be worth about $20B. When we spoke with Dan Sundheim in February, here's how he described the investment: "SpaceX was pretty obvious to me that the launch business, at a minimum, was going to be a very good business. What they had achieved, just from an engineering perspective, was insane. If I could buy a company that had achieved the most amazing engineering feat I'd ever seen, at some multiple of revenue with very little cash burn at that point, I didn't know what was going to come, I just knew that the skew was very good. The initial prognosis was just always that they were going to be a low cost provider of launch. Starship is a game changer, which we knew about fairly early on, but didn't know if it would work. And what that means, very simply, is that the cost of launching everything goes down dramatically, 97% or whatever. And the engineering that they've done with the satellites to harness solar power and be able to deliver really high-speed bandwidth has surprised me to the upside. And there's a lot of software that goes into that too, just given these networks of satellites are all communicating. The ramification of that is that the telecom market globally is now the TAM. They've come so far down the cost curve, I think that in a relatively short amount of time they're going to be dramatically cheaper than any other form of delivering broadband."
Invest Like the Best140,246 views • 4 months ago
Gavin on why people misunderstand what makes TSMC so valuable: "One of the most undervalued pieces of the supply chain story is that almost none of these things are buy it once and never talk to the vendor again. You have to go collaborate. That is the most important part of being successful in chips. People look at the tech, and the tech is the best in the world. But the real value is all in the service. TSMC's customer service is way better than I've seen at any company in any industry. If you say, we think you can improve your yield by making this change, they will go run an experiment on their own dime to see if they can get the higher yield. When we found we were right and it worked, they moved it over to the rest of the line. If I go to a steelworks plant and say I want you to change the composition of the steel, they'll say screw you. Not TSMC. It's why they're number one, and why they're going to win."
Invest Like the Best71,350 views • 2 months ago
In 1960, 60% of young Americans one year into their first marriage owned their home. By 2023, that had fallen to 42%. Walter Russell Mead (Walter Russell Mead) has a theory for why homeownership feels out of reach, and how we can fix it: "The single family home in the suburbs replaced the single family farm. Think about not only building the freeways and the highways, but subsidies through the tax code so that municipal bonds are tax-free, which means towns can build the infrastructure that attracts developers and homeowners, who then raise the value of the property, so you can repay the bonds out of the higher property values the infrastructure has created. Tis kind of wealth-creating machine. Right now we seem to be reaching the limits of that wealth-creating machine, because it's just too expensive for the average person to buy a house and land close enough to where you work so the commute isn't killing you. Homeownership is one of the real big problems for why young people are unhappy with the economy. Between remote work and hybrid work and self-driving cars, if you only have to go into work once or twice a week, you can work farther out. If you expand the commuting radius from 40 miles to 75 miles, the amount of land that is developable for housing goes up with the square of the radius. It's geometric. Information technology appropriately deployed can open up for another two generations this wealth-creating machine."
Invest Like the Best12,679 views • 16 days ago
Ben Thompson uses the Strait of Hormuz to explain why memory makers squeezing the market now guarantees they lose their leverage later: "I think the memory makers probably screw themselves in the long run by creating such a massive target on their back. The issue with the Strait of Hormuz is that it's very effective if you don't use it. Then it's always hanging out there as something you could do. Now they did, and it turns out it worked. But the UAE and Saudi Arabia, they're going to build pipelines, they're going to build new ports. They're not going to let this happen again. So it's very painful right now, but say Iran wants to close the Strait of Hormuz in 2035. It's not going to have any effect, because it will have been built around. My concern for the memory makers is they might have done the same thing. No one is going to let themselves get in this situation again."
Invest Like the Best21,582 views • 1 month ago
Gavin's takes on Microsoft, Google, Meta, & Amazon: Microsoft ($MSFT): "I like Satya, I admire him. He's an exceptional CEO, and I give him a lot of credit for the decisions he's made. But he did go from, "We're going to make Google dance," to being the product manager of Copilot in 3 years. The decision Satya is making now, which the market has punished him for, but I think is the right decision — who knows how fast Azure could be growing if they were willing to just sell GPUs to OpenAI. 'We're going to use our compute internally to make our own products better.' One reason Copilot was so bad, or has been so bad, is that there wasn't enough compute available. They're fixing that. He's making good decisions that are risky decisions, to position Microsoft for this world where frontier models are no longer API-accessible. It's a really courageous decision that I give him a lot of credit for. Microsoft probably would be an $800 stock today if they were using their GPUs to serve solely OpenAI and Anthropic's capacity instead of using them for their own products." Google ($GOOG): "Google was incredible last year because they had that TPU advantage, which is now gone. The reason I think they're still in a great position is they have the most compute of everyone. We talked about the value of installed bases being higher as a result of shortages — they have the biggest installed base of compute. Google I/O is this week. If they don't release something that even slightly leapfrogs OpenAI and/or Claude, that's interesting. It's not a disaster for Google, it's just interesting. Between the amount of data they have, the YouTube data, the amount of compute, the search business — Google's never not going to be in a good position. You see that with GCP going crazy." Meta ($META): "You've got to give Zuckerberg immense credit, for what he's done in terms of making Meta an AI-first company internally. He is the only one of those true internet giants to have done that. I give him a lot of credit for paying up when he did for contracts, that talent. And Muse was a really big upside surprise. It was the first model from MSL, and it's not on the Pareto frontier with xAI, Google's one entrant, OpenAI and Claude, but it's pretty close. That was very impressive to me. So Meta is in a better position — still not as strong of an absolute position as Google, but a better position." Amazon ($AMZN): "Amazon is in a really strong position because of Trainium. You're going to see real P&L efficiencies from robotics over the next 18 months in their retail business. I actually think Nova — their internal models are not where Muse is, but they're better than they get credit for. The two companies who are the most deeply engaged with startups are Amazon and Nvidia by a mile. It's going to end up being a pretty big advantage for Nvidia and Amazon — with Google right behind them — to have this engagement that you just don't see from these other hyperscalers."
Invest Like the Best52,492 views • 4 months ago
A truly memorable response to Patrick's final question. @buhrman_rick
Invest Like the Best249,667 views • 3 years ago
Sam Altman: "I'm not a jobs doomer at all. I think there are gonna be tons of jobs.” If we could go back to 2019 and show people our latest model, not only would they say that it's AGI, they would say that the economy would have been completely upended. And that has not happened. Anytime you're that wrong and that confident, which I think we were as a field, you have to update. AI is just very jagged. It's like superhuman genius in some ways, like dumb toddler in others. And people have, so far, extremely complementary skills to AI. It’s not taste…the world may need a new kind of word for the kind of judgment that people are very good at that AIs seem to really deeply struggle with. You can go hire an AI consultant right now or talk to an AI sales rep or hire an AI engineer. And somehow most people seem to still really prefer interacting with a human. I definitely would rather engage with a person than engage with an AI for almost everything. Human values have value because they're human. We are deeply hardwired to care about people.”
Invest Like the Best20,730 views • 2 months ago
In 2016, five founders and a deck walked into Benchmark to pitch a hardware company. Eric Vishria didn't want to take the meeting. Benchmark hadn't made a semiconductor investment in ten years, and he remembers thinking, why are we even going to a hardware pitch? This is crazy. The team was excellent and the first slide said GPUs actually suck for deep learning. They just happen to be 100 times better than CPUs. This was pre-transformer. OpenAI was a weird research lab. The TPU hadn't been announced. Nvidia was worth $40 billion, not $4 trillion. The first question in 2016 was whether AI was even a big new workload. There had been many attempts at specialized chips for other things that simply never ended up mattering. Benchmark had conviction that this one would. The second question was whether the workload introduced a new constraint. It did. AI benefited massively from the parallelism of GPUs, but GPUs didn't solve the communication between cores. This was a communication-bound problem, and nothing on the market addressed it. There are only three ways to speed up deep learning in hardware, then and still today. More cores. Faster communication between cores. Memory closer to the compute. Their pitch was to take all three to their logical maximum at once. A single wafer-scale chip with 450,000 cores and 20 gigs of SRAM, so the system never has to leave the chip to reach memory, and every core sits on the same wafer, so communication between them is as fast as physics allows. It was the best you could possibly do. As soon as Eric heard the idea, his reaction was, "of course". Engineers had been attempting a wafer-scale chip for 50 years. Every attempt had failed. Cerebras got a working chip on the first try. Then came the long middle of the story that nobody romanticizes, the years of work required to turn a scientific achievement into a business. "In software, if you have that logical block diagram of why it works and everything else, you're 80% of the way there. And it's a matter of go-to-market execution. In hardware, you're like 2% of the way there." A chip that powerful has to be packaged, heated, cooled, programmed, and sold. In 2019, Eric sat in a board meeting watching the chip melt. The company had raised roughly $500 million by then, and the thought running through his head was "holy shit, we're going to lose all this money." The company kissed death three times. Virtually every respected semiconductor investor passed. People made fun of the early customers. Today Cerebras is worth more than $50 billion. Eric said it years before anyone knew how it would end. Whether Cerebras worked or not, it was an effort worth venture capital. Try to build the thing people have failed at for 50 years, when there's finally a reason it could work. Hardware is hard. This team "just never fucking quit".
Invest Like the Best16,120 views • 1 month ago
Shyam explains how China thinks about conflict: "It's not enough for China to be prosperous. America must fail." "There a formidable adversary in the sense that their conception of war is deception. Our conception of war is kinetic. It's the lone heroic cowboy against the odds winning through heroism." "If you look at agriculture, it's a business decision whether you want to buy American soybeans or not. It's a different thing when you're trying to smuggle in agricultural funguses, so we can't grow soybeans. That's the shape of what's happening." "A lot of the things that are happening are below what we would consider the threshold of conflict, but it absolutely is conflict. It is system destruction warfare." "There'll be some point at which we just react. The best quote I have from Admiral is it's no longer John Boyd's OODA loop -- observe, orient, decide, act -- it's the American OODA loop -- observe, overreact, destroy, apologize."
Invest Like the Best18,828 views • 6 months ago