Suffiyan Malik
@suffiyanmalikk • 2,793 subscribers
long form interviews and conversations at https://t.co/ZAKyqCEGoo, day job in vc.
Videos
Dmitri Alperovitch (Dmitri Alperovitch) says Taiwan is the most complex military operation and has historically been hard to conquer including a past US failure when tried and China is not ready. He explains this in detail: Dmitri Alperovitch: "This has been the biggest military modernization in human history that's happened in this rapid period of time by China. So they've come a very long way... But if they go for this invasion, it will be the most complicated military operation in history." CrowdStrike Silverado Policy Accelerator
Suffiyan Malik81,753 次观看 • 3 个月前
I got to sit down with David Ulevitch (David Ulevitch 🇺🇸) for E31 of We The Builders (We The Builders). He is a General Partner at a16z where he cofounded the $1.776 billion American Dynamism practice with Katherine Boyle about 4 years ago. Since then, it has taken over the timeline and become the language many use to describe frontier, deep or hard tech. Friend of the show Christopher Lochhead 🏴☠️ ✍🏼🎙 calls this Category Design, where you don’t necessarily have to be the first to become a category leader, you need to frame the problem and do it better than everyone else. We talk about investing strategy, founding story of American Dynamism and what made it a sticky brand, what he has learnt about how the world works from his anthropology background, surveillance concerns with public safety technologies, his best mentor who is not Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 and more. American Dynamism focuses on investing in areas such as public safety, aerospace, logistics, national security, defense, manufacturing, industrialization, logistics. Some of the companies in their portfolio include Anduril Industries , Amca, Applied Intuition , Apex Space, Astro Mechanica , Astranis Space Technologies , Base Power , California Forever , Castelion , Hadrian , Northwood , Radiant and of course SpaceX. Founders of many of these will be featured in upcoming episodes or are friends of the show. David was previously the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, a cloud-delivered security service that was acquired by Cisco in 2015 for $635 million. While at Cisco , David was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Security — a $2.4 billion annual revenue business with more than 5,000 team members — where he oversaw the company’s global cybersecurity strategy, product portfolio, and business (via A16Z). Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:57 - Defining American Dynamism 05:43 - Project Maven and Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy 07:24 - Competing with General Catalyst for Anduril 08:49 - Category creation and defining the market 10:57 - The marketing engine of “The American Dream” 15:20 - Replicating Silicon Valley 18:22 - Robot Dogs and General Catalyst 19:47 - 1776 Million: Building the American Dynamism Practice 20:59 - Why Hardware Outperforms Software Over Time 22:38 - Coupling Defense, Energy, and Space 26:28 - Investing in Public Safety 33:01 - Investment Committees are “stupid” 35:39 - Long-term partners over short-term bets 39:23 - Policy, Regulations, and navigating relationships in DC 43:11 - How regulations are slowing us down 46:54 - The Industrial Supply Chain Divergence 51:29 - Global Maritime Dominance and Expanding TAM 53:39 - Venture-Backable Bets in Critical Industrial Infrastructure 1:00:24 - Applying Anthropology: Study of People, Culture, and Political Power 1:04:08 - What Drives Innovation Across Nations? 1:11:49 - Regional Talent and State Incentives 1:15:48 - Moving from Benevolent Dictator to Minority Investor 1:20:42 - Life is Checkers, Not Chess: Agency and Knowing When to Sell 1:26:57 - OpenDNS and the Pivot to Enterprise: Letting Markets Dictate Your Revenue 1:30:13 - The High Bar for Talent: Grittiness, Grind, and Magnetic Leadership 1:33:09 - Attracting Capital via Narrative: Storytelling vs. Lying 1:35:07 - Toastmasters and Single-Topic Debates: Sharpening Communication 1:37:20 - Modern Credentials: Domain Expertise and Sourcing True Signals 1:44:23 - Government Sales 101: Enterprise Sales on Steroids 1:46:34 - Closing
Suffiyan Malik23,785 次观看 • 1 个月前
Special episode The Hill & Valley Forum with Billy Thalhaimer (Billy Thalheimer), Cofounder & CEO of Regent (REGENT). Regent is building all-electric Seaglider vessels for fast, safe, and low-cost coastal transportation. The company is backed by Founders Fund , Lockheed Martin , Mark Cuban , Caffeinated Capital , 8090 Industries and more. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 04:45 - Dual-Use Framework 08:45 - Strategizing for the Indo-Pacific 12:45 - Reinvigorating American Shipbuilding: Addressing the Competitiveness Gap 16:45 - Rhode Island's Maritime Hotbed: Proximity to Talent and Capital 20:45 - Hardware as a Durable Moat
Suffiyan Malik58,863 次观看 • 3 个月前
Special episode from The Hill & Valley Forum: A conversation with Dmitri Alperovitch (Dmitri Alperovitch), Cofounder of CrowdStrike (a $100B company), Silverado Policy Accelerator and Author of World on the Brink Dmitri has correctly predicted three wars including the Russia-Ukraine war and has a prediction for China going after Taiwan. Timestamps: 00:00 - 00:52: Introduction and high-level shift in Silicon Valley’s view on national security and government 00:53 - 02:28: His work with Silverado Policy Accelerator and predicting wars 02:29 - 04:16: Timeline and political factors regarding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan 04:17 - 06:27: The extreme military complexity of a Taiwan invasion compared to historical operations like Normandy 06:28 - 07:54: Unpredictability of war and the high stakes for the Chinese Communist Party in the event of failure 07:55 - 09:59: The evolving relationship between Silicon Valley and the government, and the resurgence of interest in hardware and defense tech 10:00 - 11:12: The necessity of investing in kinetic capabilities and "kill missions" within defense technology 11:13 - 12:28: Challenges with "consumer grade" versus "military grade" technology in active conflict zones like Ukraine 12:29 - 15:08: The importance of integrated systems and operational strategy over individual "widgets" or drones. 15:09 - 17:11: The relationship between new defense tech startups and established "prime" contractors 17:12 - 19:35: Outlook for the next American century and the containment of global threats like China 19:36 - 22:57: Analysis of the U.S. defense industrial base, production capacity, and historical policy choices regarding munitions stockpiles 22:58 - 25:17: Re-industrialization through AI and robotics, and final advice for founders to solve the military's hardest existing problems
Suffiyan Malik66,172 次观看 • 3 个月前
Around 11,000 Americans are retiring every single day for the next 10 years. 60m people in the US are retired. Medicare is one of the biggest problems among this community, there are 100s of providers and choosing the wrong one could either mean losing thousands of dollars or your life (I think Cobi quoted a report citing ~20% fatality on choosing the wrong provider). If your parents are not in that age group yet, you probably haven’t started thinking about this but it is one of the biggest and most underserved markets in the US. The opportunity is not to just help senior citizens with Medicare, the opportunity is to redefine what retirement means for people over the age of 65. My maternal grandfather retired at the age of 82 and was one of the healthiest and fittest people up until then. Your health cannot be wholly defined by your diet and exercise routine, purpose in life plays an equal if not one might argue a bigger role. In my day job I work with Tim Draper, his dad Bill Draper who I met a couple of years ago was going to office twice a week at 95 years of age. Charlie Munger did the Berkshire Annual Shareholder meeting with Warren Buffett at 99. If you can figure out a way to give purpose to people over 65 and activate them that is ~23% of the US population by 2050. What impact could that have on the GDP? I will leave that for you to imagine. You probably have an uncle, grandparents or parents where you can see the difference between the ones who hang up their boots and the ones who never retire. There is something about the keeping your brain active which is more meaningful in many ways then even your diet or gym routine. In our last episode we had Colin Greenspon on the show who started Narya Capital. Narya is an early investor in Chapter, cofounded by Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz and Vivek Ramaswamy. JD Vance and Peter Thiel were on the board of the company and maybe that is why the company is widely misunderstood or MAGA labelled, hear from the CEO Cobi on the masterplan of Chapter. My conversation with Cobi is his first long form podcast and it is one of the best ones I have recorded so far. He was incredibly candid and insightful as we got to dive into his time at Palantir where he spent 5 years, why he chose to go after the ~60m seniors (aged above 65) in the US to make Medicare easier for them, utility of AI in its current state, recruiting talent and some common myths in business. Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz Chapter Vivek Ramaswamy Narya Colin Greenspon
Suffiyan Malik114,547 次观看 • 8 个月前
“You don't want to hire people that are at the top of the bell curve. You have to wait until someone comes along that is many standard deviations above—like 7 standard deviations, not just 3.” Christian Keil (Christian Keil) shares the story behind hiring Jason Carman (Jason Carman). Hear him talk about the "generational video talent" and also what was the thought process behind having an in-house premium media. “Jason didn't send a fancy resume. He made us a custom video explaining why he should be our camera guy. No one else did that.” Astranis Space Technologies, a16z
Suffiyan Malik22,373 次观看 • 2 个月前
E23: Leland Miller Breaks Down The China Threat. IP Theft, GDP Fabrication, Taiwan Takeover. What is Really Going On? Leland is the Cofounder of China Beige Book, which according to some media reports has been labelled as a firm having more data on China than even the CIA. He is also a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission (U.S.-China Commission). He has advised Fortune 50 CEOs and top government officials including the Congress on China. In this conversation we talk about: —> The espionage in the tech industry from universities to companies —> Why China has long-term strategy for Taiwan where they expect the West to self-implode —> How U.S banks including JP Morgan were partially responsible for covering up China’s real economic condition —> How China fabricated their GDP —> What happened to the great China opportunity? —> China’s military readiness And more. Full episode now available wherever you get your podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:26 - China 101: The death of the “China Dream” 09:26 - Surveillance, residency permits, and the reality of internal environment 11:04 - Supply chain leverage: Why critical minerals are national security 13:50 - The pharmaceutical threat: Chinese control of U.S. medication supply chains 16:34 - Strategic decoupling: Reshoring and friendshoring national security nexuses 19:45 - Dependence on Chinese foundational materials 24:21 - The military balance in the Pacific: Why everyone thinks they would lose 27:56 - Command readiness: Xi Jinping’s military purges and wartime memory loss 31:13 - Geostrategy in the neighborhood: Japan, Philippines, and missile distance 35:20 - Made in China 2025: The fourth industrial revolution playbook 37:46 - Reindustrialization hurdles: Shipbuilding, chips, and bipartisan focus 39:50 - Breaking the rare earth processing monopoly 43:54 - An Economic Security Strategy: A 5-point master plan for the US 49:19 - IP theft and clones: The deep-rooted issue of technological espionage 52:01 - The STEM dilemma: Training talent in the U.S. and letting them go back 55:27 - China’s compute disadvantage and U.S incentives 01:00:23 - The Food and Energy problem 01:06:12 - Xi Jinping’s psyche: Paranoia, time horizons, and the Taiwan ticking clock 01:10:56 - Economic sensibilities: Global frustration with the imbalanced trade model 01:16:35 - Why China doesn’t drive global growth 01:19:02 - GDP Fabrication: Trillon-Yuan exaggeration 01:28:41 - Tracking credit and stimulus in a “non-commercial” system 01:33:59 - AI, Quantum, and Biotech integration 01:45:18 - Counterbalancing industrial policy 01:58:19 - Why China uses 12x more robots than prediction 02:08:52 - Why Xi doesn’t care about consumers 02:14:35 - Closing thoughts
Suffiyan Malik25,253 次观看 • 3 个月前
E16 of We The Builders with Mike Solana (Mike Solana), Editor In Chief of Pirate Wires and CMO of Founders Fund is now available wherever you get your podcasts. Twitter/X is a battleground where you defend your ideas and murder the ones you don’t stand for (as you will hear in Mike’s own words). There is little room for nuance as I too have observed and so the Twitter/X persona of people you see often wouldn’t be the right way to categorize the person. As I prepared for this episode, I discovered how Mike has changed his opinion on topics throughout the years after discovering new information. He is one of the most independent minded people out there and it was a lot of fun to sit down for a conversation on media, Pirate Wires, Founders Fund marketing, state of advertising, charter cities and more. Mario Gabriele 🦊 did a four part series on Founders Fund a while back and described their marketing strategy as soft power initiatives. Some of these included Peter’s book Zero To One, Hereticon and Pirate Wires to name a few. Mike Solana has been at the centre of this strategy which made him a billionaire media tycoon (iykyk). At Founders Fund, he has been able to stay ahead of rivals with a team only four full time people on the marketing team compared to teams of fifty at other funds of similar size. Now he helps us make sense of the world of tech, business and politics through Pirate Wires. Friend of the pod Christopher Lochhead 🏴☠️ ✍🏼🎙 would probably agree that Mike has been able to build new categories around ideas he stands for representing important problems of the time. Some of these are limited standalone brands, others are cultural movements. One example of this is Hereticon, where he was able to create the category of “Thoughtcrime” which went mainstream after Elon bought Twitter. There were two editions of Hereticon (2022 & 2024) and it looks like it won’t make a comeback. Mike’s strategy is to be different. Once you have created a category and are not unique anymore, you move on. In true Zero To One fashion. Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction 03:06 - Building a media company vs building a tech startup 05:41 - Building culture in a company 11:36 - Substack vs having your own website 17:51 - The utility of advertising 29:24 - Building a large audience vs. building a quality audience 35:55 - Twitter strategy and evolution in the past 5 years 47:10 - Pirate Wires master plan and inspiration from Walt Disney 53:16 - Charter cities in America 1:03:03 - The podcast experiment 1:15:03 - Mike’s information diet 1:29:18 - Working on Zero To One with Peter Thiel and marketing at Founders Fund 1:38:05 - Rapid fire and closing thoughts
Suffiyan Malik25,095 次观看 • 5 个月前
E14 with Packy McCormick about building Not Boring, new media business models, Ramp vs Brex (timely?), his thesis of vertical integrators, his creative process and more. If you’ve spent any time in tech over the past few years, you’ve probably read Not Boring or at least seen a screenshot of it on X/Twitter. Packy built it from a Substack assignment during David Perell's Write of Passage course into one of the most-read newsletters in technology, now at over 250,000 subscribers. Encouragement goes a long way. David in that course told him his first assignment was the best piece of writing he had seen in the class which gave Packy the confidence to keep going. He talks about his fear of being made fun of (by your friends) if you publish on the internet or nobody caring and ever reading. I can relate, it is one of the reasons I recorded for 6-7 months before hitting publish in July last year. The funny thing is, 250,000 subscribers later that feeling never completely goes away. We touch on that too. Every Not Boring essay is a full-stack teardown, part history lesson, part strategy memo, part “why this would matter in 10 years.” Today, Packy sits at the intersection of media and venture, David Perell described this new era of creators and personalized business models as building a personal monopoly. This applies to podcasting, newsletters or blogs and any other form of new media at the intersection of tech and business where the differentiation lies in the creator - they are like Hollywood talent and the brand they represent is secondary and in some cases irrelevant. They are the brand. We live in the era of what my friend Christopher Lochhead 🏴☠️ ✍🏼🎙 would call creator capitalism. For Packy, great writing is deal flow. He has invested in companies like Ramp (now valued at over $32B) and Astro Mechanica (bringing back supersonic air travel) and many more through his fund. What he now spends most of his time on is doing well researched deep dives which are a function of the relationships he builds along the way. If you are chronically online on X/Twitter, you would have seen his latest masterpiece, a deep dive on a16z. Hope you enjoy! Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:11 - Why publish on Substack and the origins of Not Boring 01:42 - Write of Passage with David Perell 04:51 - The content pyramid and compounding experiences 15:46 - Insights from working in co-working industry 28:07 - The Ramp case study and the concept of uncertainty window 36:56 - Ramp vs Brex 41:32 - Vertical integrators thesis 51:45 - Media, venture, and the future of tech media 00:00:55 - Twitter vs Substack for creators 1:10:19 - Advice to We The Builders 1:12:59 - Growing the team, getting better, and hiring 1:21:57 - Playing the long game, measuring success over decades 1:33:32 - Wrapping up — favorite shows and books 1:40:53 - Signing off
Suffiyan Malik15,329 次观看 • 6 个月前
We are going to be in El Segundo tomorrow at 2pm. It’s time to build for the next frontier. One of my goals has been to highlight and support the best entrepreneurs of our time on a mission to solve the hardest problems. We are not from this planet. We have worked very hard to colonize it and in the process, humans have evolved as a species and come a long way. All of modern technology sector and Silicon Valley are only 50 odd years old. Internet, mobiles, computers, chips, social media - everything happened in the last 50 years. We have always underestimated what we can achieve in decades. We end up getting caught up in 5 year plans. I believe, in my lifetime, we are going to colonize another planet. Humans will land on another planet. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. We figured out how to colonize earth, we will figure out how to colonize another planet. Millennials and GenZ will be around to see it. I just don’t know if they’ll be 60 or 80 when they do. One of the questions me and all my friends building in space-tech get asked very frequently is, how does this benefit life on earth? My answer: Space colonization is not just about spaceships and rockets, we have to make significant advancements in robotics, food and agricultural tech, biotech, materials science, transportation, energy and future of software - AI, AGI, ASI - bits superpower atoms. All of this, benefits life on earth. Every new discovery, every new experiment, advancement, benefits life on earth. Having to reimagine how you would occupy a planet with all the hindsight and knowledge, it’s not just a generational opportunity to make a small dent in human history but it’s also the greatest economic opportunity of our time. We discovered ice and built usecases for it and we eventually invented refrigeration. We discovered fire and eventually invented heaters, stoves and combustion engines. Airplanes were invented only 120 years ago. Zoom out, think about the possibilities. If this makes you jump out of bed, if you feel shivers down your spine, if you feel adrenaline thinking about all this - you’re my kinda people. We saw a historic SpaceX launch a couple of days ago. We have companies who are working on manufacturing drugs in space. We have companies building micro nuclear reactors. What a time to be alive. More importantly, I am hosting the founders building these companies and future of our industry in the heart of El Segundo - the flag bearer of all progress in the world of atoms. You will hear from Doug Bernauer , cofounder and CEO Radiant , Will Bruey , cofounder & CEO of Varda Space Industries Jason Dunn, cofounder and CEO of Outpost and Redwire Space (Formerly Made In Space) and John Coogan from Founders Fund
Suffiyan Malik36,887 次观看 • 1 年前
We The Builders EPISODE 1 is LIVE with Shahin Farshchi at Lux Capital Shahin has invested in companies manufacturing in space (Varda Space Industries), building autonomous transportation systems (Zoox), providing robots as a service (Formic), automating industries (Covariant), using space to revolutionize the Earth observation industry (Planet), 3D printing rockets (Relativity Space) and many more. The Jetsons Future I thought I would be living in 2025 is partly being built. We have a long way to go but this is exactly how we inspire the next generation. If someone from 1900 woke up and read this, they would call it science fiction. Thank you Shahin, for believing in and being a partner to these incredible companies and founders. Shahin is an incredibly kind soul, helpful, accessible and a role model for younger aspiring venture capitalists. From what I have personally observed and heard from friends building companies, he will cheer you on and have incredible empathy for the fact that you had the courage to build. In many cases, more than capital, that is what you need most. Highlights & Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 02:13 - Berkeley to Iran in teenage 05:01 - Adapting to different education systems 09:05 - Early transformative experiences 14:49 - Mentors and role models 18:20 - On breaking into research labs and flipping rejections 25:01 - Story of getting into grad school, applying for funding, and early research 32:41 - Going from research to venture capital 34:50 - Commercializing his research and starting a company 38:04 - Thoughts on ingredients of a good startup 45:11 - Where do the best founders come from 50:34 - Why PhDs are not equipped to commercialize 1:02:00 - Breakthrough innovation timeline 1:05:00 - Solving for shareholder demand 1:10:22 - How to think about what problem to solve 1:14:10 State of the education system
Suffiyan Malik23,844 次观看 • 1 年前
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