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.benahorowitz.eth explains why moats like code and UI may not work in the AI era: "For my entire career, the one thing that you knew about technology companies is you couldn't throw money at the problem." "With AI, that's really changed in that you can throw money at the...

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19,416 views • 4 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Ben Horowitz explains why AI killed the 'Mythical Man Month': "For my whole life in technology, there was this thing called the Mythical Man Month: nine women cannot have a baby in a month." "If you're Google, you can't just put a thousand software engineers on a product and wipe out a startup because you can only... build that product with seven or eight people. Once they've figured it out, they've got that lead." "That's not true with AI. If you have data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve almost any problem. It is magic." "You can throw money at the problem. We've never had that in tech." benahorowitz.eth with David Solomon and David Haber
1:11

Ben Horowitz explains why AI killed the 'Mythical Man Month': "For my whole life in technology, there was this thing called the Mythical Man Month: nine women cannot have a baby in a month." "If you're Google, you can't just put a thousand software engineers on a product and wipe out a startup because you can only... build that product with seven or eight people. Once they've figured it out, they've got that lead." "That's not true with AI. If you have data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve almost any problem. It is magic." "You can throw money at the problem. We've never had that in tech." benahorowitz.eth with David Solomon and David Haber

a16z

259,244 views • 7 months ago

Ben Horowitz on the oldest law in startups, and why the industry no longer has to obey it: "The one thing we all knew in startup world is that if I have a two-year lead on you and you try to catch me by hiring 1,000 engineers, you're gonna wreck your company." "That never works. It's a Mythical Man-Month. Nine women can't have a baby in a month. That's it. That never works." "Okay, now that works. But it's not hiring 1,000 engineers. It's taking $3 billion and lighting up a magnificent cluster, and then all of a sudden, whatever, Grok can come out of nowhere and, oh, all of a sudden it's real." "You can throw money at the problem, and you can throw money at almost any problem, and that works. That is just completely different than anything we've ever lived through. By the way, we're all psychologically adjusting to this." benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg
1:17

Ben Horowitz on the oldest law in startups, and why the industry no longer has to obey it: "The one thing we all knew in startup world is that if I have a two-year lead on you and you try to catch me by hiring 1,000 engineers, you're gonna wreck your company." "That never works. It's a Mythical Man-Month. Nine women can't have a baby in a month. That's it. That never works." "Okay, now that works. But it's not hiring 1,000 engineers. It's taking $3 billion and lighting up a magnificent cluster, and then all of a sudden, whatever, Grok can come out of nowhere and, oh, all of a sudden it's real." "You can throw money at the problem, and you can throw money at almost any problem, and that works. That is just completely different than anything we've ever lived through. By the way, we're all psychologically adjusting to this." benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

194,973 views • 17 days ago

Travis Kalanick's rule for pacing a company's ambition: "I'm constantly creating problems. 'Hey, let's do Uber in China.' And you don't have a full understanding of that problem when you create it. If you create a problem, you have to solve it." "I have this framework I call the meta problem. The derivative of your problem creation must be less than or equal to the derivative of your problem solving." "If it's not, you have a real problem. You're underwater." "You're guessing at what your capacity is to solve problems, and you're guessing six months, 12, 18 months ahead. When you get it really wrong, you must stop all problem creation so that you can get back above water." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg
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Travis Kalanick's rule for pacing a company's ambition: "I'm constantly creating problems. 'Hey, let's do Uber in China.' And you don't have a full understanding of that problem when you create it. If you create a problem, you have to solve it." "I have this framework I call the meta problem. The derivative of your problem creation must be less than or equal to the derivative of your problem solving." "If it's not, you have a real problem. You're underwater." "You're guessing at what your capacity is to solve problems, and you're guessing six months, 12, 18 months ahead. When you get it really wrong, you must stop all problem creation so that you can get back above water." travis kalanick benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg

a16z

213,675 views • 1 month ago

Ben on why AI broke the old laws of company building: "If you'd ever built a software company, you knew you could not just throw money at the problem. If somebody built a great product and it took them three years and did it with a small team, Google's not going to hire 2,000 engineers and catch them. That was a law of physics. Now, if you have the data and enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything. We've seen that with Elon catching the big models in no time. He just took a lot of money, a really good data center design and some smart engineers. And he got in the game very fast. That would have never happened in the past. The markets also much, much bigger than anything we've ever seen. It would cause you to think about valuations and long-term value. On the one hand, when you calculate the long-term value, what if this market wasn't $50 billion, what if it was $5 trillion? On the other hand, what if somebody could catch you? These are concepts we've not dealt with."
1:23

Ben on why AI broke the old laws of company building: "If you'd ever built a software company, you knew you could not just throw money at the problem. If somebody built a great product and it took them three years and did it with a small team, Google's not going to hire 2,000 engineers and catch them. That was a law of physics. Now, if you have the data and enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything. We've seen that with Elon catching the big models in no time. He just took a lot of money, a really good data center design and some smart engineers. And he got in the game very fast. That would have never happened in the past. The markets also much, much bigger than anything we've ever seen. It would cause you to think about valuations and long-term value. On the one hand, when you calculate the long-term value, what if this market wasn't $50 billion, what if it was $5 trillion? On the other hand, what if somebody could catch you? These are concepts we've not dealt with."

Patrick OShaughnessy

67,368 views • 7 months ago

"You can not run a big nation like ours in the manner that suggests you have not really thought through your policies and you have not come up with creative ways to solve the problem" A member of PDP, Segun Sowunmi #PoliticsToday
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"You can not run a big nation like ours in the manner that suggests you have not really thought through your policies and you have not come up with creative ways to solve the problem" A member of PDP, Segun Sowunmi #PoliticsToday

Channels Television

84,263 views • 2 years ago

ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski says that research is a head start and product ecosystem creates a moat: “The way we think about it, research is head start.” “We can give advantage to the customer earlier. And it's 6-12 month of advantage.” “You have research, product in parallel that extends that, but the thing that will really give that long-term value is the ecosystem that you create around, whether that's the brand and distribution, whether that's the collection of voices you can have, the collection of integrations you can build, the workflows that you can build.” Source: ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski on No Priors with sarah guo and Elad Gil
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ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski says that research is a head start and product ecosystem creates a moat: “The way we think about it, research is head start.” “We can give advantage to the customer earlier. And it's 6-12 month of advantage.” “You have research, product in parallel that extends that, but the thing that will really give that long-term value is the ecosystem that you create around, whether that's the brand and distribution, whether that's the collection of voices you can have, the collection of integrations you can build, the workflows that you can build.” Source: ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski on No Priors with sarah guo and Elad Gil

a16z

19,730 views • 9 months ago

This is one of my favorite movie endings... It has a powerful lesson: "At some point, everything is going to go south on you...and you're gonna say 'this is it, this is how I end.' Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is, you just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem. Then you solve the next one. And the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home." This is the beautiful thing about life: No matter where you are today—no matter how deep in the darkness—you are always just one good decision away from being in a better place tomorrow. You can always focus on that one decision—that one problem—in front of you. Don't worry about the hundreds or thousands of decisions that you still have to make to get to where you want to be—just focus on the next decision. Just begin. Solve one problem. Then solve the next one. And the next. "Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated." - Confucius
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This is one of my favorite movie endings... It has a powerful lesson: "At some point, everything is going to go south on you...and you're gonna say 'this is it, this is how I end.' Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is, you just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem. Then you solve the next one. And the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home." This is the beautiful thing about life: No matter where you are today—no matter how deep in the darkness—you are always just one good decision away from being in a better place tomorrow. You can always focus on that one decision—that one problem—in front of you. Don't worry about the hundreds or thousands of decisions that you still have to make to get to where you want to be—just focus on the next decision. Just begin. Solve one problem. Then solve the next one. And the next. "Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated." - Confucius

Sahil Bloom

213,822 views • 2 years ago

"Until we run out of problems, we're not going to run out of demand." Erik Torenberg, Martin Casado, Ben Horowitz, and Raghu Raghuram on why AI demand has no ceiling, and what that means for supply: "As we've moved from chatbots to reasoning to agents to multi-agents, each step has multiplied the number of tokens a single task takes up by increasing orders of magnitude." "The simple way to think about it is any problem that you have can be solved with enough infrastructure and money. GPUs and power, and money." "AI's answer to getting better and better is to use more AI. Inference is one basic building block that it keeps using over and over and over again." "In the past, money would come in, you have an engineering problem, we know that it takes two years, normally fails... [Now] there's nothing between the money going in and then the hardware creating intelligence. And so now we're just limited by our ability to create supply." martin_casado benahorowitz.eth Raghu Raghuram Erik Torenberg
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"Until we run out of problems, we're not going to run out of demand." Erik Torenberg, Martin Casado, Ben Horowitz, and Raghu Raghuram on why AI demand has no ceiling, and what that means for supply: "As we've moved from chatbots to reasoning to agents to multi-agents, each step has multiplied the number of tokens a single task takes up by increasing orders of magnitude." "The simple way to think about it is any problem that you have can be solved with enough infrastructure and money. GPUs and power, and money." "AI's answer to getting better and better is to use more AI. Inference is one basic building block that it keeps using over and over and over again." "In the past, money would come in, you have an engineering problem, we know that it takes two years, normally fails... [Now] there's nothing between the money going in and then the hardware creating intelligence. And so now we're just limited by our ability to create supply." martin_casado benahorowitz.eth Raghu Raghuram Erik Torenberg

a16z

38,880 views • 14 days ago

Asmongold reveals the real reason people hate capitalism "Do you know why people hate capitalism? Because capitalism is the acknowledgement that you are a failure of your own design. The reason why you don't have what you want is because you're not smart enough, you haven't put in enough work, or you haven't come up with a good enough idea to earn that thing." "Capitalism is accountability. Socialism, communism, this is group consensus accountability. And nobody ever really gets held accountable for doing something right or wrong ever. And that's it."
0:38

Asmongold reveals the real reason people hate capitalism "Do you know why people hate capitalism? Because capitalism is the acknowledgement that you are a failure of your own design. The reason why you don't have what you want is because you're not smart enough, you haven't put in enough work, or you haven't come up with a good enough idea to earn that thing." "Capitalism is accountability. Socialism, communism, this is group consensus accountability. And nobody ever really gets held accountable for doing something right or wrong ever. And that's it."

Asmongold Updates

204,509 views • 2 months ago

Elon Musk: “You think that someone like Bill Gates who started a technology company that’s one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft —you think he'd be really quite, strong on the sciences, but actually, he's not strong in the sciences, He came to visit me at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin and was telling me that it's impossible to have a long-range, semi-truck. And I was like, 'Well, but we literally have them, and you can drive them, and Pepsi is literally using them right now’ This was really surprising”
1:51

Elon Musk: “You think that someone like Bill Gates who started a technology company that’s one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft —you think he'd be really quite, strong on the sciences, but actually, he's not strong in the sciences, He came to visit me at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin and was telling me that it's impossible to have a long-range, semi-truck. And I was like, 'Well, but we literally have them, and you can drive them, and Pepsi is literally using them right now’ This was really surprising”

Mars University

598,584 views • 4 months ago

Scott on why conviction in an idea is dangerous as an investor but required as a founder: "From the investor seat, I don't think you want to be in love with an idea. That's a risky thing because you'll find a way to express that by investing and make some compromises on the team because you know this idea is just so good, its time has come. But if the team isn't there, 90% of the time it doesn't work. Then there's a whole thing can you swap out the team? But the whole Founders Fund thesis was always no, you need the founder to run the company. But on the company side, you have to be in love with the idea. It's not that rational to start a company. There's a lot easier, more comfortable ways to make money if that's the goal. So it's got to be about what the company is doing specifically. If you want to actually start a company, it better be something that you're really passionate about, or you think that the problem is really important."
1:15

Scott on why conviction in an idea is dangerous as an investor but required as a founder: "From the investor seat, I don't think you want to be in love with an idea. That's a risky thing because you'll find a way to express that by investing and make some compromises on the team because you know this idea is just so good, its time has come. But if the team isn't there, 90% of the time it doesn't work. Then there's a whole thing can you swap out the team? But the whole Founders Fund thesis was always no, you need the founder to run the company. But on the company side, you have to be in love with the idea. It's not that rational to start a company. There's a lot easier, more comfortable ways to make money if that's the goal. So it's got to be about what the company is doing specifically. If you want to actually start a company, it better be something that you're really passionate about, or you think that the problem is really important."

Patrick OShaughnessy

33,016 views • 5 months ago

"The one thing that's going to be truly future proof is judgment. What is the biggest challenge when you have a thousand AI engineers writing code? AI slop. In an era when you can do everything, the question is which of these things matter. On the engineer side, it is evaluating the code. Which of this code is even valuable? You can have AI engineers writing beautiful code that could be wrong, that could have bugs in it, that could be vulnerable. Someone needs to review it. Make sure to have a human review at some point, especially critical code that is in the core of your system. On the product side is judgment around what needs to be built and evaluating. And similarly in design, you have to have judgment around, does it make sense in the broader design system. I think this judgment is the number one thing that humans are going to bring in an era of infinite productivity."
1:12

"The one thing that's going to be truly future proof is judgment. What is the biggest challenge when you have a thousand AI engineers writing code? AI slop. In an era when you can do everything, the question is which of these things matter. On the engineer side, it is evaluating the code. Which of this code is even valuable? You can have AI engineers writing beautiful code that could be wrong, that could have bugs in it, that could be vulnerable. Someone needs to review it. Make sure to have a human review at some point, especially critical code that is in the core of your system. On the product side is judgment around what needs to be built and evaluating. And similarly in design, you have to have judgment around, does it make sense in the broader design system. I think this judgment is the number one thing that humans are going to bring in an era of infinite productivity."

Patrick OShaughnessy

24,818 views • 7 months ago

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.
2:42

If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing.

#BUILDAWELL

148,205 views • 2 years ago

Gabbit Robotics co-founder Nicole Mattero on why the next AI winners won't fight over your screen, they'll fight to get closer to you: She kicks things off with what she admits is a hot take: "My hot take is that hardware is the only moat going forward because anyone's going to be able to spin up a model and make it really good and really cheap." Her logic is simple. Once a strong model is cheap and easy for anyone to build, the model alone can't set you apart. So what actually protects you? "Where does that leave you? Basically companies that have tactile modes such as hardware are the only ones that actually survive." Hardware, though, is only one piece of her argument. The second piece is data: "The models that win in the long run are the ones where private data is their [moat]." From there, Mattero ties the two together. Hardware gives a company one moat. The ability to gather unique personal data gives it another. Put both in place and the edge starts to multiply: "When you have a company that has hardware as a [moat], but then B is able to collect really unique personal data, that also becomes a [moat]." And that, she says, is the reason so many foundation model companies are reaching beyond the screen and into the physical world: "That's why I think a lot of these foundation models are like, let's get something in the home or on the person. It gives them an edge on both fronts."
0:45

Gabbit Robotics co-founder Nicole Mattero on why the next AI winners won't fight over your screen, they'll fight to get closer to you: She kicks things off with what she admits is a hot take: "My hot take is that hardware is the only moat going forward because anyone's going to be able to spin up a model and make it really good and really cheap." Her logic is simple. Once a strong model is cheap and easy for anyone to build, the model alone can't set you apart. So what actually protects you? "Where does that leave you? Basically companies that have tactile modes such as hardware are the only ones that actually survive." Hardware, though, is only one piece of her argument. The second piece is data: "The models that win in the long run are the ones where private data is their [moat]." From there, Mattero ties the two together. Hardware gives a company one moat. The ability to gather unique personal data gives it another. Put both in place and the edge starts to multiply: "When you have a company that has hardware as a [moat], but then B is able to collect really unique personal data, that also becomes a [moat]." And that, she says, is the reason so many foundation model companies are reaching beyond the screen and into the physical world: "That's why I think a lot of these foundation models are like, let's get something in the home or on the person. It gives them an edge on both fronts."

Big Brain AI

19,342 views • 3 months ago

Warren Buffett on success: “You can have all the money in the world, you can have buildings named after you, or a hospital wing… and unless you’ve got people that really care about you, you’re not a success.”
0:27

Warren Buffett on success: “You can have all the money in the world, you can have buildings named after you, or a hospital wing… and unless you’ve got people that really care about you, you’re not a success.”

Investment Wisdom

25,827 views • 4 months ago

From Charles Hudson on why it's potentially more dangerous to sit out of a bubble than to participate: "That's my lesson from 2021. Because it’s not as if the people who were sober and restrained during 2021 have gotten a lot of credit from their LPs for having not participated in the circus. So I’m like, is that really what modern venture capital is about today? If there’s a speculative frenzy, the rational thing to do, if your goal is to remain a venture capitalist, might be to participate in the frenzy. Even if you have deep skepticism about the final outcome. You need to remain relevant. You need to remain in business and be able to raise capital. And to do that, your firm has to be relevant. And feel like you get the message. And if that's true, that leads you in a really different set of directions than it would if you’re just like, “Hey, the people who go crazy and lose a bunch of money on bad things will be punished. And the punishment will be you will not raise another fund.” I don’t really think it works that way."
1:29

From Charles Hudson on why it's potentially more dangerous to sit out of a bubble than to participate: "That's my lesson from 2021. Because it’s not as if the people who were sober and restrained during 2021 have gotten a lot of credit from their LPs for having not participated in the circus. So I’m like, is that really what modern venture capital is about today? If there’s a speculative frenzy, the rational thing to do, if your goal is to remain a venture capitalist, might be to participate in the frenzy. Even if you have deep skepticism about the final outcome. You need to remain relevant. You need to remain in business and be able to raise capital. And to do that, your firm has to be relevant. And feel like you get the message. And if that's true, that leads you in a really different set of directions than it would if you’re just like, “Hey, the people who go crazy and lose a bunch of money on bad things will be punished. And the punishment will be you will not raise another fund.” I don’t really think it works that way."

Turner Novak 🍌🧢

100,942 views • 2 months ago

ex-Amazon VP (Ethan Evans): "One of the hardest things for people to understand is I've identified a legitimate weakness in my boss. I go to my skip. Why doesn't he do something? Well, if you come to me with a weakness in one of my employees, there is subconsciously this process that goes on that says, I have two choices. I can believe that you're overly sensitive and high maintenance. In which case, I don't really have a problem. You are the problem. And you know, you're two levels down for me. So if you quit, well, the manager has to do the backfill. And I can tell the manager, you know, Ryan was here. He said this, that and the other. Maybe you can work with him. And that's exactly what you don't want is me ratting you out. But I can make it my manager's problem. On the other hand, if I agree with you and I'm like, you know what, this manager I have really isn't that good. Now I have three problems. This is really bad for me. One, I have to decide what to do with my manager. Maybe I have to manage them out. Two, if I do manage them out, I have to hire and train somebody else. And three, while they're gone, I have to do all their work myself. So you can see why, even if it's subconscious, I have a lot of reasons not to listen "
1:04

ex-Amazon VP (Ethan Evans): "One of the hardest things for people to understand is I've identified a legitimate weakness in my boss. I go to my skip. Why doesn't he do something? Well, if you come to me with a weakness in one of my employees, there is subconsciously this process that goes on that says, I have two choices. I can believe that you're overly sensitive and high maintenance. In which case, I don't really have a problem. You are the problem. And you know, you're two levels down for me. So if you quit, well, the manager has to do the backfill. And I can tell the manager, you know, Ryan was here. He said this, that and the other. Maybe you can work with him. And that's exactly what you don't want is me ratting you out. But I can make it my manager's problem. On the other hand, if I agree with you and I'm like, you know what, this manager I have really isn't that good. Now I have three problems. This is really bad for me. One, I have to decide what to do with my manager. Maybe I have to manage them out. Two, if I do manage them out, I have to hire and train somebody else. And three, while they're gone, I have to do all their work myself. So you can see why, even if it's subconscious, I have a lot of reasons not to listen "

Ryan Peterman

1,249,200 views • 5 months ago

Ben Horowitz: AI is the greatest equalizer of opportunity we’ve ever seen. "Starting from day one, it was completely democratized. The AI that anybody gets access to is a very powerful AI. Anybody with a phone—and now most people in the world, at this point, have smartphones—can get superintelligence in their phone." "Every child can have a super-advanced, amazing tutor/teacher. Great education is accessible to all now." “All systems end up with a lot of inequality, but you can try, systematically, to give everybody an opportunity. I think AI does a really good job of that.” Source: benahorowitz.eth on Invest Like the Best with Patrick OShaughnessy
2:12

Ben Horowitz: AI is the greatest equalizer of opportunity we’ve ever seen. "Starting from day one, it was completely democratized. The AI that anybody gets access to is a very powerful AI. Anybody with a phone—and now most people in the world, at this point, have smartphones—can get superintelligence in their phone." "Every child can have a super-advanced, amazing tutor/teacher. Great education is accessible to all now." “All systems end up with a lot of inequality, but you can try, systematically, to give everybody an opportunity. I think AI does a really good job of that.” Source: benahorowitz.eth on Invest Like the Best with Patrick OShaughnessy

a16z

35,868 views • 7 months ago

Elon warned about the AI energy bottleneck before most people even understood it was coming “I can’t emphasize enough - we need more electricity. However much electricity you think you need, it’s more than that” Now if look at what is happening. AI labs are raising billions, buying tons of GPUs, and announcing giant clusters But then reality hits: Where do you plug them in? This is why the AI race is really an energy race. Even the most sophisticated labs can have the money, the chips, and the models but none of it scales without the grid capacity to feed it The bottleneck is not just GPUs anymore. It is electricity, substations, transmission, permitting, and the ability to actually plug these massive clusters into the real world Elon saw this years ago and now everyone else is catching up
0:23

Elon warned about the AI energy bottleneck before most people even understood it was coming “I can’t emphasize enough - we need more electricity. However much electricity you think you need, it’s more than that” Now if look at what is happening. AI labs are raising billions, buying tons of GPUs, and announcing giant clusters But then reality hits: Where do you plug them in? This is why the AI race is really an energy race. Even the most sophisticated labs can have the money, the chips, and the models but none of it scales without the grid capacity to feed it The bottleneck is not just GPUs anymore. It is electricity, substations, transmission, permitting, and the ability to actually plug these massive clusters into the real world Elon saw this years ago and now everyone else is catching up

X Freeze

1,080,554 views • 2 months ago