Loading video...

Video Failed to Load

Go Home

Colin Anderson (former CFO, Palantir) on forward-deployed engineering; when it works and when it doesn’t. “The FD model is great in certain markets, terrible in others… you’ve got to be solving a hard enough problem.” “A world-class engineer plus their equity dilution is an expensive check. You have to...

tbpn's profile picture

TBPN

247,789 subscribers

84,418 views • 10 months ago •via X (Twitter)

Science & TechnologyNews & PoliticsEducation
LIVE

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

0 Comments

No comments available

Comments from the original post will appear here

Related Videos

Peter Thiel on the question he asks every startup founder he invests in “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other team are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20.
1:21

Peter Thiel on the question he asks every startup founder he invests in “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other team are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20.

Startup Archive

316,188 views • 10 months ago

Lightspeed's Bucky Moore says the real opportunity in the AI app layer is in large industries far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and where the context engineering to get customer data into the model is extremely nuanced and messy. "I think this is kind of the elephant in the room right now — whether post-training open-source models combined with the unique user feedback you get from being an application provider is defensible enough." "That is going to be an inevitable challenge for any of these industries that hit a maturation point of AI adoption, like legal and software engineering have." "But on the other hand, there are some industries where they're very large, they're far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and probably will continue to be — and the context engineering to actually get the customer data into the model is just so messy. It requires going across different business functions, it requires a lot of hands-on forward-deployed engineering." "Those are the kind of companies that we get really excited about. Because I think being really good at that is not only defensible, but it also allows you to generate a feedback loop with your customers, where you hear a lot of their secrets. And those secrets allow you to feed that back into how you make your product better at the expense of anyone else playing in the space. Because if you're serving the customer, they're only serving you those secrets." "I think Palantir is a good example of this in the pre-AI era, and I think we're going to see many companies ascend in that same way."
2:28

Lightspeed's Bucky Moore says the real opportunity in the AI app layer is in large industries far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and where the context engineering to get customer data into the model is extremely nuanced and messy. "I think this is kind of the elephant in the room right now — whether post-training open-source models combined with the unique user feedback you get from being an application provider is defensible enough." "That is going to be an inevitable challenge for any of these industries that hit a maturation point of AI adoption, like legal and software engineering have." "But on the other hand, there are some industries where they're very large, they're far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and probably will continue to be — and the context engineering to actually get the customer data into the model is just so messy. It requires going across different business functions, it requires a lot of hands-on forward-deployed engineering." "Those are the kind of companies that we get really excited about. Because I think being really good at that is not only defensible, but it also allows you to generate a feedback loop with your customers, where you hear a lot of their secrets. And those secrets allow you to feed that back into how you make your product better at the expense of anyone else playing in the space. Because if you're serving the customer, they're only serving you those secrets." "I think Palantir is a good example of this in the pre-AI era, and I think we're going to see many companies ascend in that same way."

TBPN

46,746 views • 4 months ago

What an epic opening to a press conference from John Calipari “When you’ve done this a long time and you’re in the business of young people, it is about the name on the back of the jersey. Yes, we’re doing it for Arkansas.. I’ve kind of been that way and done alright at every school I’ve been at. You can say it’s wrong. You can either be P’d off or be peed on.”
1:11

What an epic opening to a press conference from John Calipari “When you’ve done this a long time and you’re in the business of young people, it is about the name on the back of the jersey. Yes, we’re doing it for Arkansas.. I’ve kind of been that way and done alright at every school I’ve been at. You can say it’s wrong. You can either be P’d off or be peed on.”

Trey Wallace

410,620 views • 4 months ago

Peter Thiel: Why will the 20th employee join your company? When deciding whether or not to invest in a founder, Thiel asks: “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other teams are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20. Source: Pando
0:59

Peter Thiel: Why will the 20th employee join your company? When deciding whether or not to invest in a founder, Thiel asks: “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other teams are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20. Source: Pando

Startup Archive

40,425 views • 2 years ago

Yann LeCun (Yann LeCun) just revealed why he left Meta, Why are LLMs an extremely narrow field, and how "World model" is the way to build really meaningful agentic future. 🎯 Beautiful and simple in 1.5 mints. "I can’t imagine we can build agentic systems without those systems having the ability to predict, in advance, what the consequences of their actions are going to be. The way we act in the world is that we can predict the consequences of our actions, and that’s what allows us to plan. So what is a world model? Given the state of an environment, a system you want to control at time t, and given an action or intervention you imagine taking, can you predict the state of the world (or the system) at time t + 1? If you can, that’s a world model. You don’t do this at a pixel level, if it’s video. You do this in an abstract representation space, and that’s a crucial key insight." --- From 'AI House Davos" YT channel (full link in comment)
1:40

Yann LeCun (Yann LeCun) just revealed why he left Meta, Why are LLMs an extremely narrow field, and how "World model" is the way to build really meaningful agentic future. 🎯 Beautiful and simple in 1.5 mints. "I can’t imagine we can build agentic systems without those systems having the ability to predict, in advance, what the consequences of their actions are going to be. The way we act in the world is that we can predict the consequences of our actions, and that’s what allows us to plan. So what is a world model? Given the state of an environment, a system you want to control at time t, and given an action or intervention you imagine taking, can you predict the state of the world (or the system) at time t + 1? If you can, that’s a world model. You don’t do this at a pixel level, if it’s video. You do this in an abstract representation space, and that’s a crucial key insight." --- From 'AI House Davos" YT channel (full link in comment)

Rohan Paul

383,162 views • 5 months ago

Shoving yourself into a position you can’t access without a lot of compensation usually isn’t the best idea if you have knee pain. To be clear, I think the Knees Over Toes approach has good qualities to it. This is not an attack on the methodology or the people involved in it. However, this is a critique on how this exercise, and many like it, may not be the best choice for many people. Some can and have seen success from these programs, but I’ve met a whole lot who haven’t. If it works for you, that’s awesome. Keep going. But if it doesn’t, then it may be time to try something different.
1:20

Shoving yourself into a position you can’t access without a lot of compensation usually isn’t the best idea if you have knee pain. To be clear, I think the Knees Over Toes approach has good qualities to it. This is not an attack on the methodology or the people involved in it. However, this is a critique on how this exercise, and many like it, may not be the best choice for many people. Some can and have seen success from these programs, but I’ve met a whole lot who haven’t. If it works for you, that’s awesome. Keep going. But if it doesn’t, then it may be time to try something different.

Conor Harris

15,854 views • 2 years ago

JUST IN: Chamath Palihapitiya makes a big claim that Warren Buffett’s insane pre 2000 returns may have benefited from access to information asymmetry not available to the public Here's what he had to say: "In 2000, we introduced the law called Reg FD. And what was the point of Reg FD? It was basically that if you're a CFO, you cannot talk to an individual stock manager and tell him something that you then don't tell everybody else. Essentially inside information. That used to be not illegal. I won't say that it was legal. I would just say that used to be not illegal. You call your CFO buddy, he says, "hey, how you doing?" He goes, man, "Quarter was a blockbuster." You would go and buy the stock. And starting in the 2000s, it became illegal. And there used to be these networks of information arbitrage that took advantage of this. Now, this is an example of Warren Buffett's returns, pre and post Reg FD. Now, what do you see? His returns were double the market returns when this kind of information sharing was legal. And the minute that it became illegal and you had to basically act on the same edge as everybody else, his returns went to the market return. He generated zero alpha. In fact, he probably on the margins lost a little bit. So this is the single best investor in the world. This is what happens when you have information symmetry. So it's just meant to explain that markets when there's asymmetry. Billions and billions of dollars will be made in asymmetry. The prediction markets today, unless they are regulated out of existence or shut down, will look like the stock market pre-Reg FD."
1:38

JUST IN: Chamath Palihapitiya makes a big claim that Warren Buffett’s insane pre 2000 returns may have benefited from access to information asymmetry not available to the public Here's what he had to say: "In 2000, we introduced the law called Reg FD. And what was the point of Reg FD? It was basically that if you're a CFO, you cannot talk to an individual stock manager and tell him something that you then don't tell everybody else. Essentially inside information. That used to be not illegal. I won't say that it was legal. I would just say that used to be not illegal. You call your CFO buddy, he says, "hey, how you doing?" He goes, man, "Quarter was a blockbuster." You would go and buy the stock. And starting in the 2000s, it became illegal. And there used to be these networks of information arbitrage that took advantage of this. Now, this is an example of Warren Buffett's returns, pre and post Reg FD. Now, what do you see? His returns were double the market returns when this kind of information sharing was legal. And the minute that it became illegal and you had to basically act on the same edge as everybody else, his returns went to the market return. He generated zero alpha. In fact, he probably on the margins lost a little bit. So this is the single best investor in the world. This is what happens when you have information symmetry. So it's just meant to explain that markets when there's asymmetry. Billions and billions of dollars will be made in asymmetry. The prediction markets today, unless they are regulated out of existence or shut down, will look like the stock market pre-Reg FD."

Triple Net Investor

1,307,702 views • 5 months ago

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”
1:24

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”

Startup Archive

34,567 views • 6 months ago

Caller: My mom promised to pay my student debt after school is it’s been three years now and she’s not getting it done and anytime i ask her she gets emotional about it Dave: how much do you earn? Caller: I earn about $100k Dave: Try and pay it off, your mom doesn’t care so try and pay it, how many months can you pay it off? Caller: I’ve about $20k in savings, $20k in investment and i live in NY my monthly expenditure is about $4k Dave: Great! you’re doing well for yourself, now don’t listen to any promises she makes and don’t be angry at her too much but the truth is she just doesn’t care You really think she doesn’t care? or she just doesn’t have the means anymore? You’re making over $100k why don’t you settle it yourself more of a gift to your mom? shame
1:58

Caller: My mom promised to pay my student debt after school is it’s been three years now and she’s not getting it done and anytime i ask her she gets emotional about it Dave: how much do you earn? Caller: I earn about $100k Dave: Try and pay it off, your mom doesn’t care so try and pay it, how many months can you pay it off? Caller: I’ve about $20k in savings, $20k in investment and i live in NY my monthly expenditure is about $4k Dave: Great! you’re doing well for yourself, now don’t listen to any promises she makes and don’t be angry at her too much but the truth is she just doesn’t care You really think she doesn’t care? or she just doesn’t have the means anymore? You’re making over $100k why don’t you settle it yourself more of a gift to your mom? shame

_Chase😈

81,292 views • 1 month ago

Opus 4.5 (new model from Anthropic) can do something no model could do until now: It can close the design loop. This is (in my testing) the first model that can reliably do the visual loop of Generate Code ⇛ Render ⇛ Look at it ⇛ Improve. Step 3 (Visual critique) has been a real problem for so long. Models will be myopic or defensive when reviewing designs - it's been hard to tell if this has been a training or a vision problem. Opus 4.5 seems to have fixed it - it's not amazing, but it finally *can* do it. Claude models have historically (once again, in my testing) lagged behind in terms of visual understanding. Gemini for the last year has been the best - but there might be a new leader.
10:06

Opus 4.5 (new model from Anthropic) can do something no model could do until now: It can close the design loop. This is (in my testing) the first model that can reliably do the visual loop of Generate Code ⇛ Render ⇛ Look at it ⇛ Improve. Step 3 (Visual critique) has been a real problem for so long. Models will be myopic or defensive when reviewing designs - it's been hard to tell if this has been a training or a vision problem. Opus 4.5 seems to have fixed it - it's not amazing, but it finally *can* do it. Claude models have historically (once again, in my testing) lagged behind in terms of visual understanding. Gemini for the last year has been the best - but there might be a new leader.

Hrishi

57,822 views • 7 months ago

“When you go from consumer to B2B, the number one mega-challenge that you must master is LTV:CAC.” - travis kalanick "Yes, you can make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with 'I'm going to talk to customers, and I have to make LTV:CAC work' — versus 'My LTV:CAC is the App Store' — it's a whole different ballgame." “LTV:CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go [after] small businesses, is life on hard mode. Anybody who’s crushed it on SMB, those guys are special individuals who've made that happen. Because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke."
1:00

“When you go from consumer to B2B, the number one mega-challenge that you must master is LTV:CAC.” - travis kalanick "Yes, you can make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with 'I'm going to talk to customers, and I have to make LTV:CAC work' — versus 'My LTV:CAC is the App Store' — it's a whole different ballgame." “LTV:CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go [after] small businesses, is life on hard mode. Anybody who’s crushed it on SMB, those guys are special individuals who've made that happen. Because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke."

TBPN

634,683 views • 4 months ago

Jayson Tatum on when he decided to chase Larry Bird to become the best Celtic ever: “Once you win a championship, it’s like alright, you can be in those rooms with the Celtics legends. But it doesn’t just stop at one. You’ve obviously got to win multiple, and that’s what we’re trying to do. “And I always wanted to be the best. And he’s, in my opinion, the best Celtic ever, and he did it the right way, and he’s a great guy to chase in a sense.” 🎥: Celtics on NBC Sports Boston
0:56

Jayson Tatum on when he decided to chase Larry Bird to become the best Celtic ever: “Once you win a championship, it’s like alright, you can be in those rooms with the Celtics legends. But it doesn’t just stop at one. You’ve obviously got to win multiple, and that’s what we’re trying to do. “And I always wanted to be the best. And he’s, in my opinion, the best Celtic ever, and he did it the right way, and he’s a great guy to chase in a sense.” 🎥: Celtics on NBC Sports Boston

Bobby Krivitsky

311,625 views • 1 year ago

Q: Does my startup need a business plan? In this clip from the Acquired podcast, NVIDIA founder & CEO Jensen Huang shares that he had no idea how to write a business plan when he first started the company. However, he believes business plans can be useful for teasing out important ideas before making the leap: “I think that the art of writing a business plan ought to be much, much shorter. It should force you to concisely answer: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? What is the unmet need you believe will emerge? And what is it that you’re going to do that is sufficiently hard that when everybody else finds out it’s a good idea, they’re not going to swarm it and make you obsolete?” Marc Andreessen echoes similar points in a separate interview: “The process of planning is very valuable for forcing you to think hard about what you’re doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless. In particular, now that we’re VCs, we’re evaluating pitches and when people come in, we want to hear their plan and we want to hear it in some detail because we want to see that they can think about the entire thing end-to-end. And if their initial plan doesn’t make sense, then obviously there’s an issue because they’re not quite capable of fully thinking this through. But when you get somebody who comes in and they present you the perfect plan and everything is fully integrated and makes sense, all you know from that is that they can come up with a good plan—which is good! But the odds that will be the plan they succeed on is still very small.” In a Twitter thread last year, Paul Graham wrote: “I have never read a business plan or a balance sheet… The reason I don’t care about business plans is that I can learn more from 5 minutes of interrogating the founders than from 10 pages of fluff they’ve written.” The takeaway here is that plans are valuable but you probably shouldn’t spend six months writing some long document with extensive financial forecasts before getting started. Instead, concisely define the problem you’re trying to solve—ideally this is a problem you’ve experienced personally or have some connection to. Talk to potential customers to validate your core assumptions—is this problem even real or worth solving? And think hard about what makes you uniquely qualified to work on this problem and what your competitive advantage might be versus other entrepreneurs in your space. This is your business plan. Write it down if you need to—writing can be a good forcing function for clear thinking—but you don’t need an extensive, formal document with forecasts. The plan will probably change before the ink is dry. Your time will be better spent shipping a quick MVP to see if you can actually solve this problem for just one person. Once you have your first customers of any kind, you have a startup.
1:23

Q: Does my startup need a business plan? In this clip from the Acquired podcast, NVIDIA founder & CEO Jensen Huang shares that he had no idea how to write a business plan when he first started the company. However, he believes business plans can be useful for teasing out important ideas before making the leap: “I think that the art of writing a business plan ought to be much, much shorter. It should force you to concisely answer: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? What is the unmet need you believe will emerge? And what is it that you’re going to do that is sufficiently hard that when everybody else finds out it’s a good idea, they’re not going to swarm it and make you obsolete?” Marc Andreessen echoes similar points in a separate interview: “The process of planning is very valuable for forcing you to think hard about what you’re doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless. In particular, now that we’re VCs, we’re evaluating pitches and when people come in, we want to hear their plan and we want to hear it in some detail because we want to see that they can think about the entire thing end-to-end. And if their initial plan doesn’t make sense, then obviously there’s an issue because they’re not quite capable of fully thinking this through. But when you get somebody who comes in and they present you the perfect plan and everything is fully integrated and makes sense, all you know from that is that they can come up with a good plan—which is good! But the odds that will be the plan they succeed on is still very small.” In a Twitter thread last year, Paul Graham wrote: “I have never read a business plan or a balance sheet… The reason I don’t care about business plans is that I can learn more from 5 minutes of interrogating the founders than from 10 pages of fluff they’ve written.” The takeaway here is that plans are valuable but you probably shouldn’t spend six months writing some long document with extensive financial forecasts before getting started. Instead, concisely define the problem you’re trying to solve—ideally this is a problem you’ve experienced personally or have some connection to. Talk to potential customers to validate your core assumptions—is this problem even real or worth solving? And think hard about what makes you uniquely qualified to work on this problem and what your competitive advantage might be versus other entrepreneurs in your space. This is your business plan. Write it down if you need to—writing can be a good forcing function for clear thinking—but you don’t need an extensive, formal document with forecasts. The plan will probably change before the ink is dry. Your time will be better spent shipping a quick MVP to see if you can actually solve this problem for just one person. Once you have your first customers of any kind, you have a startup.

Michael McGuiness

83,436 views • 2 years ago

Chamath explains Warren Buffett’s secret to success: “Markets thrive when there's information asymmetry” “Now I'm gonna get a lot of people really upset with me.” “This is an example of Warren Buffet's returns pre- and post-Reg FD. Now what do you see?” “His returns were double the market returns when this kind of information sharing was legal.” “And the minute that it became illegal and you had to act on the same edge as everybody else, his returns went to the market return. He generated zero alpha. In fact, he probably, on the margins, lost a little bit.” “So this is the single best investor in the world. This is what happens when you have information symmetry.” “So it's just meant to explain that markets thrive when there's asymmetry. Billions and billions of dollars will be made in asymmetry.” “The prediction markets today, unless they are regulated out of existence or shut down, will look like the stock market pre-Reg FD, and there's nothing we can do except choose not to bet it, because otherwise what you're going to have are a ton of sharps taking advantage of a ton of squares.”
0:59

Chamath explains Warren Buffett’s secret to success: “Markets thrive when there's information asymmetry” “Now I'm gonna get a lot of people really upset with me.” “This is an example of Warren Buffet's returns pre- and post-Reg FD. Now what do you see?” “His returns were double the market returns when this kind of information sharing was legal.” “And the minute that it became illegal and you had to act on the same edge as everybody else, his returns went to the market return. He generated zero alpha. In fact, he probably, on the margins, lost a little bit.” “So this is the single best investor in the world. This is what happens when you have information symmetry.” “So it's just meant to explain that markets thrive when there's asymmetry. Billions and billions of dollars will be made in asymmetry.” “The prediction markets today, unless they are regulated out of existence or shut down, will look like the stock market pre-Reg FD, and there's nothing we can do except choose not to bet it, because otherwise what you're going to have are a ton of sharps taking advantage of a ton of squares.”

The All-In Podcast

392,831 views • 5 months ago

I’m not saying the answer is to go barefoot. But I am saying 3 inches of Hoka Cloud support shouldn’t be the only way you can make it through your day. The feet have muscles too ya know? A bunch of them actually. Enough muscle to support your entire body. They run on a simple rule, just like the rest of your body- Use it, or lose it. If you can’t walk across the house or in the yard without shoes.. you’ve probably lost it.. Don’t worry.. you can get it back! Follow me to learn how.
0:39

I’m not saying the answer is to go barefoot. But I am saying 3 inches of Hoka Cloud support shouldn’t be the only way you can make it through your day. The feet have muscles too ya know? A bunch of them actually. Enough muscle to support your entire body. They run on a simple rule, just like the rest of your body- Use it, or lose it. If you can’t walk across the house or in the yard without shoes.. you’ve probably lost it.. Don’t worry.. you can get it back! Follow me to learn how.

Will🦶🏼

487,356 views • 8 months ago

Sanders: What we have here, and it’s a real issue, is that if you’re progressive, you can go out there and give a great speech, fine. You’re saying all the right things. You’re right on the issues. Great. Can you run a government? Can you be a good mayor? Can you be a good governor? All right. And what Mamdani is doing is showing that you can have a democratic socialist, progressive ideology and run a city. You know what? New York City had really serious snowstorms. It meant that people couldn’t get to work, kids couldn’t get to school, ambulances couldn’t get people to the hospital. You know what he did? He got the bloody snow off the ground and did a great job on that. People in New York City desperately need childcare, as they do in Vermont, as they do all over the country. He is now instituting free childcare for the people of New York City. That is really good. Working-class people need to buy affordable, decent-quality food for their kids. He’s starting to put grocery stores—municipally funded grocery stores—in low-income and working-class areas. That’s good. So the point is, we have got to have progressives who are not only right on the issues—and I speak as somebody who was a mayor for eight years—you’ve got to know how to run a government. You’ve got to cut through the bureaucracy. You’ve got to stand up for working-class people. You’ve got to create the best educational system in the world that we can. You’ve got to make the system work efficiently.
1:47

Sanders: What we have here, and it’s a real issue, is that if you’re progressive, you can go out there and give a great speech, fine. You’re saying all the right things. You’re right on the issues. Great. Can you run a government? Can you be a good mayor? Can you be a good governor? All right. And what Mamdani is doing is showing that you can have a democratic socialist, progressive ideology and run a city. You know what? New York City had really serious snowstorms. It meant that people couldn’t get to work, kids couldn’t get to school, ambulances couldn’t get people to the hospital. You know what he did? He got the bloody snow off the ground and did a great job on that. People in New York City desperately need childcare, as they do in Vermont, as they do all over the country. He is now instituting free childcare for the people of New York City. That is really good. Working-class people need to buy affordable, decent-quality food for their kids. He’s starting to put grocery stores—municipally funded grocery stores—in low-income and working-class areas. That’s good. So the point is, we have got to have progressives who are not only right on the issues—and I speak as somebody who was a mayor for eight years—you’ve got to know how to run a government. You’ve got to cut through the bureaucracy. You’ve got to stand up for working-class people. You’ve got to create the best educational system in the world that we can. You’ve got to make the system work efficiently.

Acyn

43,291 views • 1 month ago

Marc Andreessen: “I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices.” “We spend a lot of time working with our companies on pricing,” a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen explains. “It’s really this magical art and science that a lot of companies don’t take seriously enough.” Marc continues: “A core principle of pricing is that you don’t want to price by cost if you can avoid it. You want to price by value. Especially when you’re selling to businesses, you want to price as a percentage of the business value you’re creating.” He gives the example of building an AI that can do the job of a programmer, a lawyer, or a radiologist: “Can you price by value and get a percentage of what otherwise would’ve literally been a person? Or equivalently can you price by marginal productivity? If you can take a human doctor and make them much more productive because you give them AI, can you price as a percentage of the productivity uplift?” Marc argues that high prices are under-appreciated by founders: “The naive view on pricing is the lower the pricing, the better it is for the customer. The more sophisticated way of looking at it is that higher prices are often good for the customer because the higher price means the vendor can make the product better, faster. Companies with higher prices and higher margins can actually invest more in R&D and make the product better. Most people who buy things aren’t just looking for the cheapest price. They want something that’s going to work really well.” Marc also emphasizes this point in an interview in Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook: “What I hear from companies is, ‘Oh, we have an awesome moat, and we’re still going to price our product cheap, because we think that’s somehow going to maximize our business.’ I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. First of all, raising prices is a great way to flesh out whether you actually do have a moat. If you do have a moat, the customers will still buy, because they have to. The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more. And so number one, it’s just a good way to flesh out that topic and really expose it to sunlight. And then number two, companies that charge more can better fund both their distribution efforts and their ongoing R&D efforts. Charging more is a key lever to be able to grow. And the companies that charge more therefore tend to grow faster. That’s counterintuitive to a lot of engineers. A lot of engineers think there’s a one-dimensional relationship between price and value. They have this mental model of commerce like they’re selling rice or something. It’s like, “My product is magical and nobody can replicate it, and I need to price it like it’s a commodity.” No, you don’t. In fact, quite the opposite. If you price it high, then you can fund a much more expensive sales and marketing effort, which means you’re much more likely to win the market, which means you’re much more likely to be able afford to do all the R&D and acquisitions you’re going to want to do. And so we always try to snap people into a two-dimensional mindset, where higher prices equals faster growth.” Video source: a16z (2026)
2:00

Marc Andreessen: “I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices.” “We spend a lot of time working with our companies on pricing,” a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen explains. “It’s really this magical art and science that a lot of companies don’t take seriously enough.” Marc continues: “A core principle of pricing is that you don’t want to price by cost if you can avoid it. You want to price by value. Especially when you’re selling to businesses, you want to price as a percentage of the business value you’re creating.” He gives the example of building an AI that can do the job of a programmer, a lawyer, or a radiologist: “Can you price by value and get a percentage of what otherwise would’ve literally been a person? Or equivalently can you price by marginal productivity? If you can take a human doctor and make them much more productive because you give them AI, can you price as a percentage of the productivity uplift?” Marc argues that high prices are under-appreciated by founders: “The naive view on pricing is the lower the pricing, the better it is for the customer. The more sophisticated way of looking at it is that higher prices are often good for the customer because the higher price means the vendor can make the product better, faster. Companies with higher prices and higher margins can actually invest more in R&D and make the product better. Most people who buy things aren’t just looking for the cheapest price. They want something that’s going to work really well.” Marc also emphasizes this point in an interview in Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook: “What I hear from companies is, ‘Oh, we have an awesome moat, and we’re still going to price our product cheap, because we think that’s somehow going to maximize our business.’ I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. First of all, raising prices is a great way to flesh out whether you actually do have a moat. If you do have a moat, the customers will still buy, because they have to. The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more. And so number one, it’s just a good way to flesh out that topic and really expose it to sunlight. And then number two, companies that charge more can better fund both their distribution efforts and their ongoing R&D efforts. Charging more is a key lever to be able to grow. And the companies that charge more therefore tend to grow faster. That’s counterintuitive to a lot of engineers. A lot of engineers think there’s a one-dimensional relationship between price and value. They have this mental model of commerce like they’re selling rice or something. It’s like, “My product is magical and nobody can replicate it, and I need to price it like it’s a commodity.” No, you don’t. In fact, quite the opposite. If you price it high, then you can fund a much more expensive sales and marketing effort, which means you’re much more likely to win the market, which means you’re much more likely to be able afford to do all the R&D and acquisitions you’re going to want to do. And so we always try to snap people into a two-dimensional mindset, where higher prices equals faster growth.” Video source: a16z (2026)

Startup Archive

422,834 views • 6 months ago