Figma is a great example of that. You know, we we have this co retreat every year. He would keep on coming back, you know, year 1, year two, year three, year four, and it would still not launch.So like, why are we still inviting him. Like what what you know, you know, we always talk about conviction in this business. Danny's level of conviction behind Dylan at Figma is unparalleled.I don't think there are many examples in the business of of an investor that has had that level of conviction for so long. We'r ...

Beware of gross margin in the early days. That's a mistake we've made a couple of times. You know, you have a lot of businesses that in the early days have really bad gross margin.All the LLM providers were very clear examples of that. I think if that's the only thing that's holding you up in most cases, I would totally ignore it. We never lose a deal or pass on the deal because of price in the early stage.So, we've been around for 30 years. We invested 11.5% billion. We've returned close to 30 and we still ...

I think every developer at a top tech company growing is going to give them $10,000 a month of AI credits. Everyone's going to get 10,000, not 200, which is what we're thinking. We thought that was a lot a couple months ago.They're all going to get $10,000 a month. Every leading tech company, it's cheaper than hiring any human. So, if that means a 50x growth per developer spend, it's going to be a CFO's nightmare.But putting that aside, that's 50x growth from where we are today for cloud code and anthropic ...

What are your biggest lessons on setting comp plans effectively. >> Uh early days you got to make sure that salespeople are crushing their numbers and making money because that's going to be your best recruiting engine. Cuz you know when you're trying to sell a company that has small revenue, you need people to take a leap of faith.They got to hit the believe button. I was like who's going to be my first million-doll earner. And I would make sure that that person does that cuz you know what the best reps I ...

One of the things that people don't realize again from the outside it's how much of what you're building is for this internal company machinery and how much of that internal company machinery is simply because a lot of people within these organizations their goal isn't to build a product their goal is to tell their friends they're a VP of a thousand person or that sounds impressive and so their goal is to think about okay so how do I grow my org even faster how do I find more teams that I can hire how do I ...

So in the absence of God, you need affiliation, you need belonging, and you need signals of status. And brands are filling that void. My job as a CEO is get this thing to scale, build a good brand and good product, good supply chain, and then hand it over to someone, take it to the next chapter.But I do think like great companies don't sell. I don't value the opinions of others. I just really don't care.When people are upset with me, I'm kind of happy. And I haven't unpacked the psychology behind it. Red Bu ...

The other problem with comp, the way it works behind the scenes is, you know, HubSpot's got a compensation committee. Everyone's got a compensation committee and HubSpot wants to pay the CEO, let's say, at the 75th percentile of what her peers make. And so we look at 20 different peers of similar size companies at lasting blah blah blah blah.We peg her at that 75th percentile, which in her case is, you know, it's 20 million bucks, a lot of money. Now, if you did that for Dylan, which would be in our comp gr ...

The people who said, "Oh, Figma left $3 billion on the table." The 98 price only happened because the IPO happened at 38. The discussion they were having on the day was, let's call it the halagan discussion of do I go two bucks more and exclude Fidelity or two bucks less and take Fidelity and it's a good useful discussion. And had someone walked in and said, I know this IPO is going to price at 100 bucks a share to open tomorrow morning.Let's raise at 80. They wouldn't have had a book cuz no one has bid at ...

So I think synthetic data is actually really useful in some places, but I think people overestimate what it can do. I'll give a couple examples. So right now there are a bunch of models that have been trained really heavily on synthetic data, but like I mentioned earlier, it means that they're only good at very academic homework style benchmark style problems.They're actually terrible at real world use cases. So yeah, synthetic data, it's made models good at synthetic problems, not real ones. And we actuall ...

index. I think they have to be in a market that is as bad as you hear in the news. The performance that they've delivered and are delivering here in the future is unbelievable.I mean, largest shareholder in Figma, largest shareholder in Dream Games, largest shareholder in Whiz, second largest shareholder in Scale AAI Revolute. It's unbelievable. And and I give Index all the credit in the world for not scaling.They even reduced their latest fund size. They reduced it after the 2021 era. Like the the credit I ...