Things Ramtin Says on Podcasts

less competition. You could deploy large sums of capital into those companies and be a passive investor. I think it's probably a safe way to know that you have exposure to great companies. The main question is, if you're pricing those companies in today's environment, you need to kind of answer for yourself whether you believe it's 2019 or 2021. Because in 2021, you could have invested in Stripe at $100 billion and Stripe was a great company. It still is a great company, arguably one of the best. But today, Stripe is $179 billion, which is great. But that's what, like an 11, 12% IRR over five years, which by the way, is still better than like the bottom 75% of venture. So you can probably secure yourself a top quartile position in the venture market by backing the best companies at the highest prices because they are great companies and great companies tend to continue to be great companies. They do tend to compound over time. But I do think the thing that gives me a little concern around that strategy is how consensus the approach you described has just…

companies is that we are routinely helping them find compute because finding compute for them is not easy. A lot of the largest NeoClouds, and we have relationships with a number of them, aren't really interested in engaging with compute deals that are like sub $200 million in scale. And so companies that don't have that level of scale are, you know, trying to lease some capacity here, some capacity there. But those guys on a relative basis don't actually make up for the scale of this market. The people that are actually moving the needle for how much compute is necessary in this ecosystem are the hyperscalers, the frontier model labs, and then, you know, the companies that are private, Neolabs raising $1 billion plus seat valuations, effectively. I think the only thing that limits demand for compute over time is if their compute needs from these companies diminish, or the companies that have these compute needs have a harder time raising capital. There's a subset of companies that you know, I know that are going to continue raising because they're the best assets and they'll have all the cash they need to buy all the compute they need. I think the most interesting segment of the market, which on a relative basis is still small…