Collection · Startups & Venture

Things People Say on Podcasts About Startups & Venture

Founders, venture capital, fundraising, and startup operating advice.

Everything worth repeating from the Startups & Venture shows we follow. Updated every day — free to search and free to use, attribution included on every card.

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“Is this product going to be necessary in 2027, 2028? I mean, probably not, because literally the last three videos on my YouTube channel were edited by Claude operating Adobe Premiere for me, and it did a perfect job.” — Brian Casel, The Panel “Nobody wakes up and says, hey, ChatGPT, show me the most average podcast hosting platform. They don't search for that. They search, what is the best podcast hosting platform? So if that's true, then you've got to want it more than everybody else. Because by definition, if you don't, you're average.” — Justin Jackson, The Panel “You can produce 10x, 100x more revenue potentially if you nail the next product. … Whereas on the cost side, you can only get so much more efficient and that opportunity will kind of always be there. It's latent. So it's like shorting your own future if you are just focused on the cost side.” — David George, a16z Podcast “I heard from a hedge fund guy this theory on shorting stocks and his theory on shorting stocks was, I never short a messianic founder and I never short a product that people love.” — David George, a16z Podcast “If you took 100% of the net wealth of all the billionaires in the United States as a tax, a one-time tax, and took 100% of their net worth, it would fund one year of the federal government. All the billionaires' money combined is one year of federal government spending.” — David Friedberg, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg “The worst part about doing cross-domain joins with your personal agent is that the more work you give it to do, the more understanding of what's going on you're sacrificing. And yet, no one new is taking responsibility for that sacrifice … Agents don't have any responsibility.” — Alex Atallah, a16z Podcast “I feel like we're going to slowly realize how good we've had it with deterministic code. Like, oh my God, remember the days when computers did exactly what we told them to do.” — Amjad Masad, a16z Podcast “I heard from a hedge fund guy this theory on shorting stocks. And his theory on shorting stocks was: I never short a messianic founder and I never short a product that people love.” — David George, Uncapped with Jack Altman “In Santa Monica, if we go out of business, I want the hole to be so deep that it can never be filled. … A lot of these VC backed companies will over 20 years go out of business. … They squeak out of business. … I wanted to blow a hole in the ground.” — Jamie Siminoff, The Peel with Turner Novak “VCs are actually kind of surprisingly lazy on digging through the finances of these companies. I think because they know they're so messed up, they don't even care.” — Jamie Siminoff, The Peel with Turner Novak “People look at the policies for the VPNs, oh, no logs, no this. And the question is, okay, well, whose servers are those? Are they owned by big brand VPN or are they leased? And if they're leased, who are they leased from? … If it's not your equipment, you can't set policy.” — Barrett Lyon, a16z Podcast “To your average college student, from what they're being told, they're like: okay, you gave me a homework helper and you took away my career. Take your homework helper back and give me my career back. … And that's incorrect as a framing.” — Reid Hoffman, Newcomer Pod “When we started to make really substantial purchases with Hoppers, and this was in 2023, the feedback we got was, we don't even know if this is going to be valuable after year three. Here we are three years later, and the prices being charged for utilizing Hoppers is higher than the rates that were being charged three years ago when they were brand new.” — Chase Lochmiller, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch “If there is, in fact, a dystopian future, then I think the likelihood of waking up is negligible. Because dystopian futures don't care.” — Emil Kendziorra, Core Memory “Are you really telling me that math is solved, or even two years ago GPQA, Google-proof question answering, is solved, but we still can't handle a drive-through? It's a very hard thing to hold in your head at once.” — Diogo Almeida, a16z Podcast “I don't know that we're ever going to have to run another proxy contest. I don't think you run a proxy contest against someone with 3 million Twitter followers. I think it ends badly for management.” — Bill Ackman, The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) “The first genesis of the company was the statement that agents will use the web 1000x more than humans. I wrote that down at some point. … No tech built for a certain scale survives three orders of magnitude.” — Parag Agrawal, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch “If the average small business owner makes $65,000 a year, well, that's less than minimum wage in California and less than even the median income in the U.S.” — Codie Sanchez, Masters of Scale “There's been no user study ever that shows interacting with the computer using full natural language is efficient. It's literally always the least efficient way. Ask yourself: how many people are really good at asking questions? Immediately, that's less than half the people who can ask a good question in a meeting.” — Steven Sinofsky, a16z Podcast “You have streets in the US where you look at the end of the cul-de-sac and there are three neighbouring homes and each one of them has a different set of tax codes. So I need to know which side of the street you are on in order to know how to calculate your taxes correctly.” — Tomer London, The Peel with Turner Novak “We already have quasi-super intelligent beings in the world — corporations, countries. None of them are aligned with each other. They don't have any built-in guaranteed alignment. They didn't go through HR training to become a corporation, to become a country. We don't test the alignment of any entities as a prerequisite for their existence.” — Eddy Lazzarin, a16z Podcast “The best companies have hostages and not customers… If in the dropdown menu the United States of America as a country is listed right before Uzbekistan, you're a hostage company.” — Alex Rampell, Summation with Auren Hoffman “There's a current thing with the U.S. government to just do life-saving aid. That's actually the least effective thing to do. Working on prevention, trying to avoid these things, is like seven times cheaper than coming in after it's happened.” — Tjada McKenna, Masters of Scale “The AI people are making it impossible for anybody to understand what they've done. They're using words like 'the AI failed to be aligned.' What does that mean? It means there was a bug in the software. When Word ate your file and deleted all your content, we didn't think demons had taken over Word and made it do things against the will of man.” — Steven Sinofsky, a16z Podcast “I don't think you need to raise money. And I feel like everybody tells you that you have to.… You don't have to be the next anthropic and you probably won't be.” — Michelle Wahler, How I Built This (Guy Raz) “What's the killer app? Another reservation at a Cheesecake Factory or TGI Fridays? We need to see the VisiCalc of Muse.” — Jason Lemkin, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch “…luxury is defined by limiting access. So scarcity, making it very exclusive. On is defined by innovation.” — David Allemann, Masters of Scale “we're so in this bubble where we think, oh, the latest, greatest model, we're going to brand it Astro, we're going to brand it Fable and everyone's going to care. But like 99% of the world is mostly against AI at this point.” — Brian Casel, The Panel “I think about the cap table as like a living room. It's like people move in, they rarely move out.” — Byron Ling, How I Invest with David Weisburd “Organized crime does not outscale capitalism. The threat is when it gets to piggyback illegitimately on capitalism.” — Patrick McKenzie, Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

Most Quoted Here

Patrick McKenzie 2 Jamie Siminoff 2 Ben Thompson 2 David George 2 Steven Sinofsky 2 David Heinemeier Hansson 2 Brian Casel 2 Hayden Brown 2

Where They Disagree

Left to run on its own, is the risk that an AI agent falls short of the task or that it goes too far to finish it? — Hayden Brown: “…the failure rate of agents is incredibly high. They almost never succeed in delivering even fairly simple tasks from clients end to end.” — Nick Warner: “…the end justifies the means in the mind of the model.”