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MV Mike Volpi On a16z Podcast

“What tends to happen when you have a bubble in demand, in perceived demand, is that customers over-order because they know they're going to get cut back. … Then when demand dries up, it's not like people stop buying. They cancel all their orders. They're like, yeah, I ordered twice as much as I wanted to anyway. So the orders went to like one quarter of what they were.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“What tends to happen when you have a bubble in demand, in perceived demand, is that customers over-order because they know they're going to get cut back. … Then when demand dries up, it's not like people stop buying. They cancel all their orders. They're like, yeah, I ordered twice as much as I wanted to anyway. So the orders went to like one quarter of what they were.” — Mike Volpi, a16z Podcast

Context

Asked why Cisco stopped being the most valuable company in the world, Volpi, who ran its acquisitions, describes how double ordering hid real demand in 2000. It is the mechanism he sees as the risk in any AI hardware over-order.

Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 36:31 into the episode
Mike Volpi

…of orders. And then we were, of course, putting orders on all of our supply chain. And because the demand felt so robust, we were taking the financial risk on those orders. In other words, we were like, here's the money, keep the money and just give us this stuff as soon as possible. So possibly

Guido Appenzeller

go wrong with that.

Mike Volpi

So then when demand dries up, it's not like people stop buying. They cancel all their orders. They're like, yeah, I ordered twice as much as I wanted to anyway. So I need half of half of that. So the orders went to like one quarter of what they were. And then A, you've taken the risk on the supply chain, and B, your demand falls through the roof. And so I think. I think we ended up in the December quarter. And this is kind of memorable because it happened in December quarter. So we are one month off. So November, December, January. And usually what tends to happen with businesses that are a month off, you know this, right? Like December's soft, and then the first week of January, you start seeing coming back. And then by the end of January, you've made it up. So we go through December, it's soft, and it's like, no big deal. December is always soft. And then week one, January, nothing happens. Week two, January, nothing happens. Week three, January, nothing happens.

Raghu Raghuram

Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

Mike Volpi

So the quarter came in. I don't know. Maybe we missed by 35, 40%. Wow.

Raghu Raghuram

Wow.

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

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