Patrick OShaughnessy
@patrick_oshag • 343,819 subscribers
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My second conversation with Jeremy Giffon. His first episode became one of the most popular we've ever done. Since then he's become a friend I talk to every day, so this is a taste of one of those conversations. We discuss: - The billion dollar PDF - Why billionaires have become subservient to the "poaster" class - The philosophers who secretly shaped Silicon Valley - Lessons from the last 18 months in private markets - East v. West coast finance - Buffett + beating the market - and much more Enjoy! 0:00 Intro 5:50 The Billion Dollar PDF 11:31 Algorithms and Power Laws 20:28 Peak Guy 31:19 Opting Out of the Timeline 36:14 AI and White-Collar Jobs 43:31 The Next Era of Finance 53:56 The New Economics of Software 1:03:22 Underwriting Emerging Managers 1:18:17 Silicon Valley’s Hidden Philosophy
Patrick OShaughnessy1,611,683 görüntüleme • 13 gün önce
John Kim has raised over $70 billion in his 30-year career. At General Catalyst, he raised several flagship funds and helped build the firm into one of the largest venture investors in the world. Now he leads fundraising at Lila Sciences, a company building scientific superintelligence. His book The Tao of Fundraising is the definitive guide to attracting capital, and this conversation is a masterclass in it. We discuss: - How General Catalyst built consensus - Why money moves at the speed of trust - Persuasion = desire minus fear - The 3 laws of fundraising - The secret of the GP/LP relationship Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:00 Starting a Fundraise 10:40 How General Catalyst Built Consensus 16:56 The Three Laws of Fundraising 27:01 The Psychology of Every Sales Meeting 36:49 The Secretary of State Model 46:12 The Inner Game of Fundraising
Patrick OShaughnessy440,128 görüntüleme • 6 gün önce
Three years ago, two Harvard dropouts set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world. Almost everyone I called at the time said it was impossible. Today, Etched (Etched) comes out of stealth with $800M total raised, $1B in signed customer contracts, and a working next-gen AI chip. This was my excuse to ask the two founders, Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen, every question I have about compute and inference. We discuss: - Why they built an entire rack and not just a chip - The two technical bets behind their architecture no one else has tried - How two founders in their twenties recruited industry legends - The night they nearly ran out of money - Why whoever produces the most tokens wins If you care about the future of compute, Gavin and Rob are two people to know. I think you will find the story of what they have built hard to forget. Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:00 Why Nobody Believed Etched Would Work 14:06 Why Inference Is the Bottleneck 22:27 Gavin and Rob’s Origin Stories 33:24 Taking Huge Risks to Move Faster 49:43 Kernels, Compilers, and the AI Stack 1:02:08 Raising $100M to Survive 1:16:00 The Future of Models, Agents, and Intelligence
Patrick OShaughnessy1,331,187 görüntüleme • 20 gün önce
My guest today is Paul Tudor Jones (Paul Tudor Jones), one of the greatest macro traders of all time. He correctly predicted the 1987 stock market crash and shorted the Japanese bubble in 1990. For over 40 years, his flagship fund has had a negative correlation to the S&P 500. 100% of his returns are alpha. He says today's market has so many similarities to 2000, "the easiest bear market I've ever seen in my whole life." He makes the case for going long dollar-yen, why Bitcoin beats gold as an inflation hedge, and why he was wrong about Warren Buffett. But what I'll remember most from this conversation is Paul's zest for life. He's 71 and still wakes at 2:30 every morning to trade the London open. He works out for two hours a day. He walks with his wife every evening. He travels the country chasing peak spring and peak fall. He's so excited about the songs picked for his funeral that he wishes he could be there to hear them. Paul has lived five lifetimes in one. He's one of the most entertaining and interesting people I've met, and the conversation will leave you searching to be as passionate about what you do as he is about what he does. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:00 The Kindest Thing 13:19 Trading vs. Investing 17:33 Lessons from Warren Buffet 22:24 The Existential Risks of AI 29:54 The Nature of Trading 31:46 Bitcoin 35:55 Bubbles 42:08 A Day in the Life of PTJ 46:00 Information Overload 47:07 Passion for Markets 50:49 The Robin Hood Foundation 54:18 The Workless World 56:03 Journalism 1:00:00 Principal Components of a Great Life 1:05:06 Kill Them With Kindness
Patrick OShaughnessy5,604,255 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
Krishna Rao is the CFO of Anthropic, and this is his first podcast appearance. He joined the company two years ago when run-rate revenue was about $250M. Today it is $30B. He has helped raise ~$75B and is responsible for the procurement and allocation of compute. I feel lucky we get to hear what it is like to sit inside a company this consequential at a moment this pivotal. We discuss: - The cone of uncertainty - How he allocates compute across Trainium, TPUs, and GPUs - What investors misunderstand about model companies - Why the returns to frontier intelligence keep rising - Platform vs application and where Anthropic builds its own products - How Anthropic uses Claude internally I have asked my closing question about the kindest thing more than 500 times. Krishna's answer is one I have never heard before. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:38 The Compute Canvas 6:51 The "Cone of Uncertainty" 11:58 Why the Returns to Frontier Intelligence Are So High 16:45 Recursive Self-Improvement 20:20 Scaling Laws 23:30 Sourcing $100 Billion in Compute 28:05 Platform vs. Application Strategy 32:52 Pricing Dynamics 38:48 How Anthropic’s Finance Team Uses Claude 43:24 Raising Capital & Overcoming Investor Skepticism 52:32 Public Perception, Risks, and Government Regulation 57:25 Mythos Release 1:12:33 What Could Derail the AI Revolution? 1:13:47 Biotech and Healthcare 1:15:31 The Kindest Thing
Patrick OShaughnessy3,224,405 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
My guest today is Brian Chesky (Brian Chesky), founder and CEO of Airbnb and one of the great consumer founders of the last 20 years. Paul Graham coined "founder mode" based on Brian's experience running Airbnb. This conversation is about what comes after it, what he calls AI founder mode, and how it will force founders to focus even more on the details. We talk about his eleven-star exercise for finding product market fit, why your first hire should be a recruiter, and why Airbnb's $100B IPO became one of the saddest days of his life. Brian still comes across like the 17 year-old at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) who picked to study industrial design. His heroes are all artists. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs, all of whom were working the week they died because they loved what they did. Rick Rubin taught him that an artist is only an artist when they make things for themselves. Now Brian believes AI is the opportunity for all of us to do the same. Enjoy! Timestamps: 1:00 Studying Industrial Design 11:33 AI Founder Mode 17:02 Lack of Consumer AI Companies 22:10 Small Teams and Focused Problems 30:52 The Evolution from Founder to CEO 38:13 The 11-Star Experience 41:07 AI as a Canvas for Creativity 48:17 Detaching from Success 53:12 Founder-Led Moats 58:34 The Next Chapter of Airbnb 1:03:08 What Endures in the Age of AI 1:06:43 Lessons from Bodybuilding 1:10:20 The CEO's No. 1 Job 1:17:01 Activating Talent 1:20:39 The Kindest Thing
Patrick OShaughnessy2,650,359 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
"The most important thing in the next 3-4 years is data centers in space. In every way, data centers in space, from a first principles perspective, are superior to data centers on earth. In space, you can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day. The sun is 30% more intense, which results in six times more irradiance than on Earth. So you don't need a battery. The cooling in these data centers is incredibly complicated. Space cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum. Link satellites with lasers, and you have a faster and more coherent network than any data center on Earth."
Patrick OShaughnessy8,213,450 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce
My conversation with dara khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber. Dara took over in 2017, when Uber was losing roughly $4.5B a year. Today the company generates $10B in free cash flow and is worth about $150B. We discuss: - How Daniel Ek convinced him to take the job - How Uber spent a full year of its AI budget in a single quarter - Uber's approach to autonomous vehicles - Drones, hotels, and building a superapp - Lessons from Allen & Co, Barry Diller, and Reed Hastings Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 3:44 Bringing Order to Uber’s Chaos 7:22 Managing Stress and Going All In 14:28 Why Uber Is at the Center of AI and Physical 22:39 How to Win in Autonomous Vehicles 32:25 The Trillion-Dollar AV Opportunity 37:05 Drones, Robotaxis, and Global Adoption 38:20 Uber Eats, Uber One, and Aggregating Supply 47:00 The Future of the Uber App 55:55 Lessons from Barry Diller
Patrick OShaughnessy1,256,029 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Paul Tudor Jones says the US is more dependent on equity prices than ever, and explains what a 35% correction would trigger in the economy: "We're 252% of stock market cap to GDP. In 1929 we were 65%. In 1987 we got to ~85-90%. In 2000, 170%. If you think about the periodicity of significant bear markets. Since 1970, we get a mean reversion about every 10 years. Let's say mean revert to the past 25 or 30-year PE. That would be a 30, 35% decline. Well, 35% on 250% of GDP is 80, 90% of GDP. 10% of our tax revenues are capital gains, they go to zero. So you can see the budget deficit blowing up. You can see the bond market getting smoked. You can see this kind of negative self-reinforcing effect. In the stock market, we're over-equitized as a country. We have the highest individual equity weightings in the history of the country. And then the real problem is if you look at private equity in 2007-2008, that was about 7% of institutional portfolios. Now it's about 16% of the institutional portfolios. We're so much more illiquid than we were in 2008. The problem is that if you buy the S&P at this current valuation, the 10-year forward return is negative when you buy the S&P with a PE of 22. That's what history shows. So yes, the S&P is spectacular long-term, if you have a hundred-year view. But that's because that's an average of a hundred years, including times when the S&P 500 PE was 6, 7 and 8, or one third of what it is right now. Valuation matters a lot, and the stock market's really high and it's gonna be really hard to make money from here with any kind of long-term view."
Patrick OShaughnessy2,372,389 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
This is my sixth conversation with Gavin Baker. As always with Gavin, the conversation covers a lot of ground, but we spend the most time on watts and wafers. We discuss: - Why the wafer shortage may prevent an AI bubble - Data centers in space (reframed) - Elon's Terafab and the new chip companies challenging Nvidia - Usage-based pricing - The disaggregation of GPUs - DRAM, frontier tokens, and open source Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 7:55 Anthropic and OpenAI Valuations 12:58 Watts, Wafers, and Infrastructure 14:39 Orbital Compute and Data Centers in Space 22:49 Avoiding the AI Bubble 28:26 Terafab and the Future of US Manufacturing 32:16 Returns to the Frontier 37:23 Continual Learning 42:03 New Chip Companies 48:52 Extending GPU Lifespans and Private Credit 51:22 The Application Layer 57:32 The Token Path and Open-Source Dynamics 1:01:37 Cybersecurity 1:05:46 Diversity Breakdown 1:11:59 Assessing the Big Tech Players in AI 1:19:02 Geopolitics, Personal Safety, and the AI Horizon
Patrick OShaughnessy1,658,694 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
"The West Coast is definitely eating the East Coast." Jeremy Giffon on where the next great financial firms will come from: "Venture capital has created the biggest businesses in the world, and private equity has not. The largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leveraged buyout. The core idea behind it is like using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money. What does it look like when the largest financial firms in the world, their founding action was seed investing? It's equity driven, it's power law. It's hugely optimistic. Venture capital is this tiny little asset class that has produced all the most important things in the world. It is this civilizational technology which is you're willing to give young people millions of dollars to try a very speculative idea with basically no retribution or downside if it doesn't work.
Patrick OShaughnessy277,640 görüntüleme • 13 gün önce
My conversation with Daniel S. Loeb, his first ever podcast and one I've been wanting to do for years. Dan started Third Point in 1995 with $3 million. Today the firm manages over $24 billion across equities, credit, venture, and insurance. Along the way he wrote some of the most iconic activist letters. We discuss: - Why deep value stopped working - The power of writing - The Twitter and XAI credit trades - Lessons from FTX and Danaher - The Sony and Sotheby's stories - What makes a great analyst today - The importance of kindness I feel lucky we all get to learn from one of the greats. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:48 Macro Views and Tech Trends 5:13 The Roots of Third Point 10:30 Evolving to Quality and Thematic Investing 19:07 Market Psychology and Inefficiencies 24:10 Good and Bad Corporate Governance 29:19 Activism 31:23 Sotheby's 41:37 AI 44:28 Sony 52:50 Danaher's Operating System 56:31 Building an Insurance Business 59:25 FTX 1:05:17 What Makes a Great Analyst Today 1:07:24 The Next Decade 1:10:00 Kindest Thing
Patrick OShaughnessy1,354,621 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
My conversation with Alex Sacerdote, founder of Whale Rock Capital Management. Alex runs more than $17B and has been one of the best performing tech investors for years, though he keeps a low public profile. As you'll hear, he is singular in how he thinks about investing through technology cycles. For over 25 years, he has built his entire investment framework around a single idea, the S-curve. We discuss: - The AI L-Curve - When to buy into an S-curve and when to sell out - The de-commoditization of data center hardware - Why he went net short software - His two models for tech adoption - Finding alpha Enjoy! Timestamps 0:00 Intro 9:55 AI's L-Curve 19:31 Whale Rock's S-Curve Playbook 26:14 Spotting Inflection Points 32:02 Finding AI Winners 40:04 AI vs Software 48:13 The Hardware Renaissance 58:04 Why Investors Miss AI 1:05:18 Whale Rock's Research Machine
Patrick OShaughnessy842,300 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Jeremy's ideas are always original My favorite from this one is "peak guy" and why the poaster is our new priestly class "I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the poasting class. It doesn't make sense that we spend so much time caring about what billionaires think about theology or health or topics unrelated to accruing a billion dollars. The reason we do is because these are the people that have ascended to the highest realm of piety in our value system. We've looked to them to provide us these answers and it has not been satisfying. Peak guy is I think we've had enough of the billionaire. The logical question is what is the next class, our next set of priests? I think it's the poaster. You can always look which class is subservient to the next to see who's next. I was at this thing with a bunch of billionaire investors and they were all fighting over who could sit next to tylercowen because he's the most interesting person there."
Patrick OShaughnessy225,569 görüntüleme • 13 gün önce
As a father of two young kids, I keep thinking about this from Dara: "I think we're doing our kids a disservice by giving them too much, being around too much. You want to love your kids, you want to know that they're absolutely loved and appreciated. But it's the challenges in life that form you, and it's the overcoming of these challenges that give humans a profound satisfaction. If you as a parent are overcoming these challenges for your kids, you're actually doing them a disservice long-term, whereas short-term you think you're doing them a favor. They've got to learn how to make it in this world themselves. A happy life is not necessarily an easy life."
Patrick OShaughnessy917,275 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Jeremy Giffon on why he doesn't worry about AI taking jobs: "Every white collar job is totally fake." We just make up stuff for us to do. That's sort of the whole point of it. What is your job as an allocator? When you have money and you don't want it to go away, you have to give it to someone. Is this useful? Yeah, sure. But it's not real. There's unlimited amounts of jobs that you can create in those scenarios. We're going to have unlimited wants and desires. So we're going to come up with new things to consume."
Patrick OShaughnessy209,037 görüntüleme • 13 gün önce
Jeremy Giffon on SPVs and the most egregious one he's seen: "We're recreating the feudal system from first principles. There are the lords, Elon, Zuckerberg, Dario, Sam, and they can make landed gentry by giving out allocations. Like Elon has given me $100 million to allocate in SpaceX. It's this wholly synthetic thing where you can, due to your relationship, get this landed estate and take it to a sovereign and they will pay you for that access. What's the most egregious fee setup you've seen? No GP commit, 10% one-time upfront fee with some carry structure, where you're demanding that you get paid life-changing amounts of money with zero risk, and then you also get a huge amount of upside. I've seen a few that don't have a term limit. There was famously a lot of SpaceX ones. Some just collect the fee forever. It's not to say these are all bad. It's not investing. It's not strictly brokering. It's this wholly insider access game."
Patrick OShaughnessy132,330 görüntüleme • 10 gün önce
Jeremy has a unique lens on how to underwrite new investment managers. He looks at whether the manager is looking up or looking down at the size of their own fund: "People overweight the investing thesis and track record and underweight the facts about the person. The personal financial situation of a manager is an incredibly underrated thing to ask about. Someone who has a million dollars in the bank, raising $100M to do a thing that they're trying to make the most money from -- that's a very different place to start from. Take two $50 million funds. One is from someone who has 500 grand in the bank and one is from someone who has $500 million in the bank. For the $500 million person, the $50 million fund might very well do better because it's held with a looser grip. You're gonna be less paralyzed by the sheer quantities of dollars. That is generally not recognized, and you see it all the time in new ventures. If you are helming something that is two or three zeros more than you have, there's just a monumental to it that is a bit intimidating...versus when you're taking bets that are negligible to you."
Patrick OShaughnessy80,785 görüntüleme • 6 gün önce
Dara (CEO of Uber) on their AI spend: "We blew through our AI budget in a quarter, for the whole year. It is forcing us to adjust. We are going to meter headcount increases because to the extent that my engineers are getting much more efficient, their throughput is increasing. There's a cost to that, and it's a significant cost. AI adoption has been occurring in all parts of the business –– whether it's engineers and how they scope projects, how they build, debugging, platform migrations. I'm pushing the teams to fundamentally use the power of AI to rebuild systems and processes from the bottoms up. I do think it's a combination for us right now of encouraging adoption, but then driving efficiency. We're using the more expensive models to explore. Once we scale some of these experiences, we'll look to bring in more efficient models that are more efficient on a token basis or are open source."
Patrick OShaughnessy616,953 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Brian Chesky shares why the saddest day of his life happened the day after Airbnb went public at $100B: "We go public, we have a hundred billion dollar valuation. It's one of the best days of my life. The next day, I go on a Zoom meeting, and it was like it never happened." "It became like the saddest day of my life. Because I realized, I got all this adulation, and I don't feel any different." "Adulation is like a cup with a hole at the bottom. You keep filling it in, thinking it's love, except it just keeps coming out the bottom." "That made me reevaluate what I'm doing this for. I want to do things for pure intrinsic reasons. Do the work like you used to do, like when you were a kid. It was light. Just make stuff. Make it for yourself." "So many entrepreneurs focus on what they want to be. "I want to be a giant tech founder. I want to run a billion-dollar company." Instead of focusing on, "What do I want to make." There's no way to fail if you're making what you love."
Patrick OShaughnessy988,213 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce