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Dave Blundin

Dave Blundin

Things Dave Says on Podcasts

Venture investor and serial entrepreneur, managing partner at Link Ventures and chairman of Cogo Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Has co-founded 23 companies, was chairman and founding CEO of Vestmark, and holds a computer science degree from MIT, where he worked on neural networks at the AI lab. Appears on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, where episode titles pair him with Salim Ismail, and sits on the XPRIZE Innovation Board.

“Cam outside here had half a billion tokens on Friday, which is about the equivalent of, I swagged at it, about 5,000 workers working for him on that day, and it cost about $5,000, so about a buck per worker per day. If those were actual human beings here in the office, they would have eaten more potato chips than that alone.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis “Even prior to the election, the big buyers, so Google, Anthropic, xAI, have reserved basically all the compute in the country for years and all the chips reserved for years. If you want a thriving entrepreneurial America, you have to have some kind of a right to compute. And the government hasn't even begun to tackle that yet. You can't innovate if you don't have access to compute, and the compute is completely sold out to five or seven big companies. That's not a really comfortable America. It's almost like the Rockefeller era again.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis “If you go to Noam Brown over at OpenAI and say, 'give me your 10 best ideas on what to work on next week that might make the algorithms faster, smarter, bigger, better,' and then you go to the AI that just solved Navier-Stokes and ask for its 10 best ideas, if Noam has six out of 10 good ideas and the AI has one out of 10, you're way past RSI, because the AI is effectively a multi-billion person research force and Noam is still one guy.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis “I never in my life have seen a technical topic like AI be a dominant topic in the elections… By and large, industrial America and technological America operates over here, the government operates over there. The government largely does nothing, and therefore industrial America thrives. Here you're seeing the biggest intersection I've ever seen of a technology that wants to grow and an election cycle that's directly commenting: 'I'm going to stop you. I'm going to have a moratorium.' Never seen anything like that before in my entire life.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis “I personally could not get an NVL72 no matter how much I was willing to pay. I finally had to sign a $15 million, three-year lease, it's the only way to get it. And it doesn't even come online until the beginning of February.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Where to Find Them

Dave Blundin hosts Moonshots with Peter Diamandis and hosts a16z Podcast . They have also been a guest on Pioneers of AI .

Recently: “The Great Collision Between Politics and AI | #309” on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis (November 2026); “Big Tech’s $3T AI Bet, Claude Writes 90% of Anthropic’s Code, AIs Editing AI Brains | EP #308” on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis (November 2026); “Making Sense of This Week’s AI Market Crashes | #x307” on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis (October 2026); “Anthropic’s $2T IPO, Elon Predicts Neocloud Death, and China’s Kimi Catches Up | #306” on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis (October 2026); “SpaceX’s AI Business Up 830%, OpenAI Agents Lie, and Startup Turns Mercury Into Gold | EP #305” on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis (October 2026); “Chamath: AGI Is Here, Anthropic’s $100B Giveaway, Elon’s SpaceX Shares for 72M Kids | EP #304” on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis (October 2026).

What They Said

“Cam outside here had half a billion tokens on Friday, which is about the equivalent of, I swagged at it, about 5,000 workers working for him on that day, and it cost about $5,000, so about a buck per worker per day. If those were actual human beings here in the office, they would have eaten more potato chips than that alone.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Salim had compared AI revenue per gigawatt with a city's economic output per gigawatt. Dave answered with a concrete example of what a day of AI spend buys at his office.

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · 2026-11-07 Permalink → Listen →
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 1:14:13 into the episode
Salim Ismail

we should nuance that and run it, run that. It'd be interesting. It would be an interesting benchmark to track where does AI generate economic output that starts to merge with the economic output of a city fully operating.

Speaker 3

…is the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants that could certainly power an American city. But I also think from an economic output, apples and oranges, because I think we're already to the right of AIs or SIs being so much more economically efficient than human workers per watt anyway.

Dave Blundin

Well, also the other thing is I mentioned on the last pod that Cam outside here had 5,000, he had half a billion tokens on Friday, which is about the equivalent of, I swagged at it, about 5,000 workers working for him on that day. And very, you know, brilliant. workers working for him on that day. And it cost about $5,000, so about a buck per worker per day. If those were actual human beings here in the office, they would have eaten more potato chips than that alone. Like it easily would have cost more than that in just potato chips. So like, well, where's the math wrong? Well, we're counting the productivity of those people as a buck a day using that math. Like, what did we pay Anthropic? But that has nothing to do with the value that we got out the other side of that AI that day. That's orders of magnitude higher than what we paid Anthropic, assuming we manage them well, which I'm still checking on. But the value you can get out of it is so much higher than Anthropic's collections, you know.

Salim Ismail

And I did that just to kind of tease out some fun conversation, but I also want to pay homage to a company generating close to a revenue run rate of $100 billion a year in such a short time. I mean, it's just so incredible to see.

Dave Blundin

And richly deserved. I mean, absolutely, absolutely deserved. I mean, given the amount of value that that company, well, their endeavor will add so much value to the world, it's immeasurable. Whether it all lands there and it becomes a huge success or it becomes a commodity and we're all benefiting…

Speaker 3

I'm just glad the frontier is competitive. It's launched tongue-in-cheek, the frontier liberation front, because I think we need the frontier to remain competitive. Our world thrives on the existence of a frontier. The American frontier west disappeared at the end of the 19th century, and so that…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Even prior to the election, the big buyers, so Google, Anthropic, xAI, have reserved basically all the compute in the country for years and all the chips reserved for years. If you want a thriving entrepreneurial America, you have to have some kind of a right to compute. And the government hasn't even begun to tackle that yet. You can't innovate if you don't have access to compute, and the compute is completely sold out to five or seven big companies. That's not a really comfortable America. It's almost like the Rockefeller era again.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

The conversation had moved from data center bans to who actually gets compute. Dave argued the bigger problem is concentration: a few buyers have locked up supply, which starves startups.

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · 2026-11-07 Permalink → Listen →
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 1:18:01 into the episode
Salim Ismail

And let's hope our politicians don't shut down all the data centers and block it or slow it down at that level.

Speaker 3

Best of times, worst of times. I don't think things are as dire as one might fear. I don't think they're as great as they might be on the other hand. But either way, recursive self-improvement to the rescue. The software is running away regardless of what's going on at the hardware layer.

Dave Blundin

Well, I think there's a much bigger issue, too, than data center pacing. Even prior to the election, the big buyers, so Google, Anthropic, XAI, have reserved basically all the compute in the country for years and all the chips reserved for years. All TSMC's capacity, they don't do multi-year contracts, but if they did, it would be locked up for years. And so if you want a thriving entrepreneurial America, you have to have some kind of a right to compute. And the government hasn't even begun to tackle that yet. Maybe that'll be a big election item in a couple of years where you can't innovate if you don't have access to compute and the compute is completely sold out to five or seven big, big companies. That's not a really comfortable America. It's almost like Rockefeller era again. And the DOJ has been basically doing nothing the last couple of years, too. That's

Speaker 3

why, from my perspective, the nightmare scenario is a repeat of what happened with nuclear energy in this country where we went through 50 years of nothingness or space exploration for that matter. I really, really don't want to see a 50-year gap in technological progress due to a moral panic…

Salim Ismail

One of our pilot clients tried to get set up on one of the clouds and went through the whole application form. And then we're told, I'm sorry, you're not big enough as a customer. We're only focusing on really big customers. So they're like, wow, what are we supposed to do? So the compute shortage…

Dave Blundin

It sure is, man. We got our NVL72 as a 72 GPU GB300 NVIDIA machine. It comes online on Feb1, but we had to use inside contact, Kush Bavaria, our good friend at Orn. Without his help, we wouldn't have been able to get it at all. Because, yeah, everything's reserved. And some of the NeoClouds…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“If you go to Noam Brown over at OpenAI and say, 'give me your 10 best ideas on what to work on next week that might make the algorithms faster, smarter, bigger, better,' and then you go to the AI that just solved Navier-Stokes and ask for its 10 best ideas, if Noam has six out of 10 good ideas and the AI has one out of 10, you're way past RSI, because the AI is effectively a multi-billion person research force and Noam is still one guy.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Salim asked how we would know if recursive self-improvement had arrived. Dave offered a thought experiment about the volume of research ideas: since ideas can be tested by running code, even a low hit rate wins at scale.

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · 2026-11-07 Permalink → Listen →
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 41:52 into the episode
Salim Ismail

If we hit RSI, how would we know? Like, what's the benchmark that would tell you that?

Speaker 3

…And every chart, every one of those sigmoidal curves points to us being either at or past the point where substantially all research at this point is actually being conducted by computer, by machine researchers rather than by human researchers. I think that's As decent a definition of RSI as any.

Dave Blundin

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And a little subtlety to add in there. If you go to Noam Brown over at OpenAI and you say, hey, Noam, you're a brilliant AI researcher. Give me your 10 best ideas on what to work on next week that might make the algorithms faster, smarter, bigger, better. Okay, write those 10 ideas down. Now let's go to Astra. And you just solved Navier-Stokes. Okay. Give me your 10 best ideas. If Noam has six out of 10 good ideas and the AI has one out of 10, you're way past RSI because the AI is effectively a multi-billion person research force and NOAA is still one guy. And so, and they're all going to get tested. It's not like there's like a, you know, it's not like being a major league batter where it matters how many times you strike out. As long as you're hitting balls over the wall, you have an infinite number of pitches. You just test them all. And so that's why all the compute is getting sucked internally. So you're way past RSI if it has any good ideas at all. Does anyone believe that it doesn't have good ideas after Navier-Stokes? I mean, of course it does.

Salim Ismail

So you ask the AI to generate a bunch of options, then it tests the options and asks it to run a bunch more. And you just keep pushing that paradigm.

Dave Blundin

Yeah, and within that area of endeavor, there's no physical experiment required. It's all just run the code.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I completely agree, Dave. And I would say Navier-Stokes, what we saw was purportedly 10,000 agents being used to solve it, but then fast forward to the slop drop, and it was three agent hours per solved problem. So it may not even be the case. It may be the case that needing a fleet of brute…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“I never in my life have seen a technical topic like AI be a dominant topic in the elections… By and large, industrial America and technological America operates over here, the government operates over there. The government largely does nothing, and therefore industrial America thrives. Here you're seeing the biggest intersection I've ever seen of a technology that wants to grow and an election cycle that's directly commenting: 'I'm going to stop you. I'm going to have a moratorium.' Never seen anything like that before in my entire life.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Asked whether Americans are rejecting AI or just refusing to subsidize big tech's data center build-out after the midterms, Dave said the election result itself was normal, but AI being a central issue was unprecedented.

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · 2026-11-07 Permalink → Listen →
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 17:46 into the episode
Salim Ismail

…so than even chips or capital. So here's the question: Are Americans rejecting AI or just refusing to subsidize big techs infrastructure buildup? And could restricting AI data centers create, like accidentally, create a huge competitive mode for the incumbents. Alex, where do you start on this?

Alexander Wissner-Gross

…under your mattress. I would say just do the obvious thing. Use superintelligence, solve the top 5,000 diseases, market the heck out of it to the general public, and suddenly the general public, to the extent they aren't already in love with superintelligence, will find a way to be in love with it.

Dave Blundin

Well, you covered a lot of things back there, Alex. But if I parse them one at a time, the election rebound, midterm election rebound is totally normal. There's nothing super unusual historical about the election outcome. But I never in my life have seen a technical topic like AI be a dominant topic in the elections. Like maybe stem cells was a factor in some elections in the past. But by and large, industrial America and technological America operates over here. The government operates over there. The government largely does nothing, and therefore industrial America thrives. Here, you're seeing, I think, the biggest intersection I've ever seen in my life of a technology that wants to grow and a government…

Salim Ismail

I think we're seeing the states kind of dominate on this compared to the federal government, which is one big, huge step. When I've looked at the numbers, it seems pretty clear that, you know, if just AI and data centers was on the ticket, 56% and you would have had a negative outcome to some…

Dave Blundin

is. I mean, it's the easy way to be a populist right now is to say, I think you're using all the water. Stop, which is just outright inaccurate stuff, but it wins votes like crazy. But what's weird to me is, you know, historically, the Metas and the Googles have been very big Democrat supporters…

Salim Ismail

messaging out there, right?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“I personally could not get an NVL72 no matter how much I was willing to pay. I finally had to sign a $15 million, three-year lease, it's the only way to get it. And it doesn't even come online until the beginning of February.” — Dave Blundin, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

Asked how long AI chips stay valuable on 30-year data-center commitments, Blundin answers with his own experience of how tight GPU supply is. He says use cases for the chips keep piling up, so he expects their value to hold.

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · 2026-11-04 Permalink → Listen →
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 35:39 into the episode
Alexander Wissner-Gross

…I'll Venmo you so Orn is in the business, among other things, of projecting out and managing underlying financial instruments for futures markets, trading on the future discounted value of GPUs, among other assets. So, my go-to answer is: just ask Orn. They have a bunch of tickets. So, we're seeing

Peter Diamandis

H-100 prices increasing, which is insane, on chips that are how old? Three years old now. But how long do we expect these chips to still be in use? Well,

Dave Blundin

that's what's amazing. Like, the use cases are going to pile up like crazy. So, one prediction is they'd keep going up in value for quite a while. But then at the same time, Alex keeps pointing out we're discovering new physics. And new physics means new ways to compute. That could be incredibly disruptive to the whole foundation. It's very, very hard to predict which will win out that race, you know, new ways to compute photonic being at the very head of the curve. Or, no, you know, the use cases are so valuable. And the efficiency of those chips is skyrocketing with algorithmic self-improvement. And so, like, I personally could not get an NVL72 no matter how much I was willing to pay. I finally had to sign a $15 million lease, three-year lease is the only way to get it. And it doesn't even come online until the beginning of February. It's like horrifically short, short chain or short supplied. And so, that's the best you can do. But I desperately want it because I know what we can turn it into.

Peter Diamandis

Salim Ismail curious. When you're on stage or you're talking to entrepreneurs, my realization is unless you've got AI in your story or longevity in your story, that competing for venture investing is almost impossible these days.

Salim Ismail

Yeah, you have to be. It's table stakes at this point, right? Even 10 years ago, Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, said the next 10,000 business plans will take a domain and add AI to it. And we're seeing that play out now. I think to answer the chip question, it's pretty clear there's a…

Peter Diamandis

10 Apollo programs. That's insane.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Startups & Venture Tech Strategy & Big Tech