Vision & Strategy - The company's early vision focused on cloud, open source, data, and AI, demonstrating foresight into market trends [1] - The company declined a $10 million offer for on-premise deployment, prioritizing its cloud-based strategy [1] Customer Acquisition & Market Shift - JP Morgan Chase initially stated they would "never be in the cloud" but later became one of the company's biggest customers, highlighting a significant market shift [1] Financials - In the early days, the company's first-year targets were less than $1 million [1]

One of the smartest things we did at data bricks was we priced based on consumption. So you could start super small but as you start to consume more it could get super big and then we expanded to multiple products all that kind of thing. But if you think about data and AI data is growing the number of queries you're going to do or grows.So having a consumptionbased model is super smart. I see this mistake a lot like people be like oh I'm going to price on users. There's a cap on users and you know if the ec ...

Ironically, Google, whom we all piss on, has executed the best of the four. They have a model that works. Apple doesn't even have a product that works.Microsoft bought someone else's product, but doesn't quite own it. So, it's kind of weird. Facebook is desperately trying to buy product, but it's not like out of success.It's out of terrible psychological need for a product, even though they don't have a business to justify it. I don't think these guys are too powerful. If anything, I think they're a bunch o ...

Almost everything about a big fund is good for the entrepreneur. Let me tell you what I mean. One, big fund you do more deals. You have 30 deals. You have more news.It's more exciting to be in a portfolio with 30 names than 10, right. In the last year, right. You have more news flow. You have more good things happen.Cuz even if you're just a freaking index, if you do 30 deals a year and we all end up at roughly the same picking ratio, and we saw that analysis, you know, the benchmark versus Andre, the picki ...

Model Scaling & Application Development - Model scaling approaches may not generalize well, creating opportunities for application developers to build specialized models [1] - Large models may not be focused on specific areas, leaving room for application-specific models [1] Business Strategy & Financials - Companies with break-even margins prioritize distribution as a board-level decision [2] - Prioritizing distribution is not always a systemic necessity for companies [2]

Market Dynamics - The AI market is experiencing rapid growth, leading to the emergence of brand effects, similar to the early internet era [1] - Brand recognition is becoming a key factor for adoption in the AI space, reducing the need for extensive education or competitive positioning [1] - Market leaders in AI are likely to establish brand monopolies and maintain them until market growth slows down [3] Competitive Landscape - While different AI models may have slight advantages, brand recognition plays a significant role, as exemplified by ChatGPT's widespread awareness [2] - Midjourney, despite receiving no institutional investment, became the market leader by surpassing the quality threshold [2] - Midjourney's continued success demonstrates the potential for brand dominance even with increased competition [3]

So here's my talk track which is I say listen you have one mortal enemy and you choose whoever that mortal enemy is and whoever it is I'm with you we're going to go kill that mortal enemy together but you get one you don't get an arbitrary number of mortal enemies and so in this case I'm like listen is this it is this your one mortal enemy and the founder said yes this is the one mortal enemy like all right them let's go kill them now listen we have a number of companies where they pivot midstream and they ...

Business Strategy - During land grab time, companies with access to relatively cheap private capital may prioritize distribution over margins [1] - The rational business decision is to sacrifice margin for distribution to acquire incremental users [1] - The long-term value of acquiring users now outweighs the short-term cost of sacrificing margin [1] User Acquisition - Acquiring users now is crucial because if a company misses the opportunity, it may never be able to monetize them in the future [1]

There's only been one sin and that one sin is zero sum thinking. We always worry about like oh is this defensible. Oh will this layer get margin. Will this layer get value.And the answer has kind of been unilaterally yes. The answer has been every layer has gotten value. Every layer has winners.These markets are so large and they're growing so fast. We're actually seeing brand effects take place in this phase of model scaling. A lot of the approaches to scaling don't generalize.This gives a ton of room for ...

There's only been one sin and that one sin is zero sum thinking. We always worry about like oh is this defensible? Oh will this layer get margin? Will this layer get value? And the answer has kind of been unilaterally yes. The answer has been every layer has gotten value. Every layer has winners. These markets are so large and they're growing so fast. We're actually seeing brand effects take place in this phase of model scaling. A lot of the approaches to scaling don't generalize. This gives a ton of room f ...