DG David George David George On 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.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“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

George was talking about how a strong founder story and loyal retail shareholders can hold up a company's valuation, which then helps it hire, raise money and buy other companies. He had just described a friend with a large position in one such stock whose whole explanation was "good vibes". He is passing on someone else's rule here, and adds that the inverse also holds.

Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 48:47 into the episode
David George

even like a thing. Right. And, you know, but like the big thing, obviously. I think a lot of people

Jack Altman

don't even really know what Palantir does. Yeah,

David George

for sure. Like including like big holder retail holders of the stock. Like a friend of mine who has a huge position. And I'm like, explain it to me. And he's like, good vibes. But what has happened, right? Like they're massively accelerated and commercial and they're now seen, you know, among CEOs as like a trusted place to go implement your AI. So it actually, it has actually given them a direct benefit on the commercial side because they're seen as like the ones that will navigate the situation for you and they're trusted. The valuation is a huge benefit for them. And then it's massive for them retaining and hiring employees, similar to the Elon companies. Like Elon, you know, obviously like having a big valuation allows him to have a bigger war chest, to buy companies, to raise more capital, to have loyal followings. So you can look at like the high retail ownership stocks and there's like a correlation if they're doing well, a correlation to the valuation. It was funny. 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. The inverse of that is if you have a messianic founder and there is a product that people love, you can actually like trade very high and have all these benefits. Right. Right now in AI, obviously you said why the capital side matters and valuation side matters. It is incredible that the whole market is like hanging by a thread on the performance of like two now kind of three private companies on like a monthly basis.

Jack Altman

I was just thinking as you were talking that the narrative, however strong the narrative is now, the importance of it all is about to go like hyperbolic as these companies get public.

David George

Yeah. And you can even see

Jack Altman

it, you know, there's this funny bit I mentioned to you, you know, you can see investors and people who are on the opposite side kind of jockeying about like trying to set expectations around these companies. Oh, yeah,

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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