Investing Billions - E371: Midas List VC: Why AI Models Will NOT Become Commodities

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

What if the biggest winners in AI won’t come from having the best model—but from building the strongest feedback loops around users? In this episode, I sit down with Hans Tung, Managing Partner a...t Notable Capital and longtime Midas List investor, to discuss how decades of investing across consumer internet and global technology shaped his thesis around AI. Hans explains why Anthropic stood out early through its developer ecosystem, how network effects emerge inside AI systems, and why the most enduring companies are built around positive feedback loops. We also explore physical AI, prosumer behavior, immigrant founders, and the psychological traits required to build category-defining companies.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hans, you've been on the Midas list several times. You're one of the top VCs in Silicon Valley. And several years ago, you had a chance to invest into Open AI and Anthropic. You chose Anthropic. What made you choose to invest in Anthropic at the time? I've been a consumer investor most of my life because the era that I've been in, whereas an investor, overlap with the rise of mobile internet, not only here in the U.S., but also in Asia. And so it's very easy for people who make money from the things that you have done, serve you well to continue the same paradigm.
Starting point is 00:00:35 So when between Open AI and Anthropic, both were amazing companies at the time. This is 2024. People would assume that I would just pick the biggest consumer play at that time, AI, and the fastest growing consumer play ever. But when Anthropic, what we saw was something that was to us very interesting. and to me personally, a consumer internet kind of signal that wasn't obvious to people. The API business for Anthropic in 2024 was their smallest business in terms of revenue size. But what is interesting about that business is, you can see a lot of developers peeing clouded for codes for things. And cursor and lovable and others were going rapidly on top of that.
Starting point is 00:01:14 For someone who's more of an aspiring historian, remember the Intel inside, what Google did with Yahoo's traffic and so forth, being embedded in something else and get the benefit of the crowd keep on ping you for things. Over time, you can imagine, as I did, that collab will get quote and more smarter because of different folks, different developers and different verticals,
Starting point is 00:01:37 asking them for codes. Each one needs to be tailored, overtime, tailor more towards that vertical. And within enterprises, you can see people paying stuff on different function, whether it's marketing or product design or coding or security, what have you. and cloud will understand better and better
Starting point is 00:01:52 what people are asking for for the particular function. So when you have that over a thousand, 10,000, a million X, you're more likely to generate a positive feedback loop that will help you to get better at delivering that kind of benefits to the users. And this is what I saw with TikTok.
Starting point is 00:02:08 This is what I saw with Airbnb. All the best kind of consumer in the company over the last 10, 15, 20 years has that possible feedback glue that make them build a moat from the wisdom of the crowd and the feedback from the crowd and reacting to what people are asking for. And we saw that with Anthropic,
Starting point is 00:02:24 was open ads being doing a bunch of different things. And it was building an empire, which is great, good for them. But Anthropic was very focused on developer. When we decided investing in property, DEPC just came out literally a few days earlier. And the token costs on DIPC is a lot cheaper. So if the token costs in the U.S. models,
Starting point is 00:02:41 close models are more expensive, you have to take that to generate a lot of value. And what's the best value you can generate in the economy like in the United States? it is building B2B application for enterprise use. In full disclosure, I'm also investor. My thesis was around B2B versus B2C. But what you're essentially saying is what you saw in Anthropic was that it was using its own recursive improvement in the code to basically improve the system.
Starting point is 00:03:05 Is that your saying? And the network effect that was creating with all the developers, keep on using it. And all the people ended up, you know, 30 years ago used Yahoo because Google embedded inside Yahoo, just getting smarter, smarter about people were searching for. So Yahoo was doing those many different things. But what was most strategic at that point in time at a time was search. It was obvious at a time.
Starting point is 00:03:23 Yahoo was doing so many things, mail, news, and whatever you can think of today, Yahoo had to back it. But the single most important thing of people back then really wanted was search. And Google nailed that as part of Yahoo. And Bing tried to do this, you know, 10 years later,
Starting point is 00:03:37 it just, you know, it's too late. Even though Bing was great, amazing engineers, great, great model, but a great algorithm, but it didn't have the feedback loop and the network fact that Google had as part of Yahoo initially and then when they spend out, continue to be able to capitalize on that. So those are kind of that just remind me a while.
Starting point is 00:03:53 This anthropic could have a chance to be hopefully bigger than the opponent, who know how long will take, but it's a closely half. Makes sense. And obviously, I love anthropic, but I'm always skeptical when people talk about these soft things like values or alignment, all these things. These are ultimately for profits. What does it mean when you say that anthropic has to have better values?
Starting point is 00:04:14 I'll give you another example. Airbnb, March. 2020. I was on the panel. Not an amazing publication with amazing journalists had four of us on. The other three, the topic of the panel, future of travel in April 2020. So, um, great timing. The other three understandably poo-pooed Airbnb, Poo-Poo-Poo Travel. Like, come on, that was one point in time. At some point, COVID is going to go away. Who don't know how long will take? But it was one point in time. And even back then, is there a chance for Airbnb to survive? What could Airbnb do in that time period? not only how long COVID will last.
Starting point is 00:04:48 And when a question was posed to me, I said, you know, staycation could be a thing. I know from first principles, most consumers, especially American consumers, cannot be cooped up in a house for two, three, four, five months at the time. People need a place to go. Sure, they cannot fly to Paris to London anymore. But people can drive. Well, I have cars. Going driving 50 miles, now 100 miles, 200 miles, we'll get to some place.
Starting point is 00:05:09 Boy, it can find place to get something different. Now, who in that world can quickly pivot and have new inventory in the supply that's in a different place, different location that was popular before. Only everybody can do that. You cannot just build a hotel like that, not quickly. So they have a chance to do something that other people cannot do and provide for a pent-up user. So when they needed it, who knows if Airbnb can execute,
Starting point is 00:05:30 but if everyone can pull it off, it will be them. Literally two days later, every main announcement had funding from several lake, in Comfortable Note. And then all the reservations were canceled so that consumers benefit. it for not being on the hook to pay for these things. And Airbnb used that money to pay the host for the cancellations to keep them in the business. That it had to let go, unfortunately, 25% of employees at the same time. Airbus went out of their way to help come out with a book of all the employees who were unfortunately let go and helped to find a job now that people can
Starting point is 00:06:04 work remotely in that process. Everything that happened reflect the ethos of Brian Chesky. And nobody in the history of travel had ever done that before. So we talk about why does values matter. We're talking about dollars and cents and zeros and ones. That's why it matters. And a moment like that builds kind of a, in a practical terms, loyalty and trust that you just won't be able to get easily anywhere else, anytime else. This is why I have several IPOs coming out also in SpaceX and Cerebrus. And although I'm excited for them to finally go public, I do have this skepticism on the public markets and inherent corruption of the long-term value of the company giving the quarterly financials.
Starting point is 00:06:45 Do you see that evolving? Is there any way to solve this issue of going public while also thinking long term? It's a quick question. I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer that. You can ask other CIOs about that. I haven't gone through six, seven IPOs already. It's really not easy. The grind of going through every quarter and focus on the question you're going to get
Starting point is 00:07:07 every quarter on those earning costs, that pressure is very, very high. and it takes a lot of time to do each one of them well, which is time taken away from running your business, making on their best. I think the best person that can think of, that can manage that and have the sort of the mental fortitude, and this is not a earth-shattering answer,
Starting point is 00:07:27 is Chen Song-Wang. I literally remember him, 2019 in KOTUS Summit, where he talks about why GPUs matter and what GPU makes sense for the different kind of verticals that they're in. There's a way before AI and before COVID. the way he talks about things and the way he thought about all the world, the way he was being willing to make his bed and be lonely for 15 years doing that,
Starting point is 00:07:48 that is a completely different world. And be able to know that you're right. Out of people are actually going to be wrong and be able to hold up you for 15 years like that. When it's kind of lonely, no one care about you is something that just is out of, it's very unusual. And to see someone like that with similar background as me, born in Taiwan, grew up outside of the U.S., and then came to the U.S.
Starting point is 00:08:09 and had the chance to go to the best goals in the U.S. and really benefit from the American system and to get back as being the largest market cap coming to the world as American, nationalized American, it is just extremely inspiring. And that's a great story for any immigrant who come to this great country for that kind of opportunity. But it's a lonely journey. And when I look at myself, my career,
Starting point is 00:08:28 the place I've been to, a lot of choices are not popular, not understood at the time, but you've got to have that mental fortitude to march your different beat. And that's the hardest thing. A lot of people, buy high, sell low, chase the latest to think. I did that as early state in my career, doing whatever's the thing at the time.
Starting point is 00:08:42 You realize that that does not work. You got to be able to chart your own path and have afforded to do that. So, you know, it's very hard to do that in the current environment. It takes a different kind of CEO to make that work. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today, investors are asked to cover more companies, move faster, and do it with leaner teams. With Alpha Sense AI-led expert calls, their TGIS call service team sources experts based on your research criteria and let's the AI interviewer get to work.
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Starting point is 00:10:28 Take advantage of Alpha Sense AI-led expert calls now. The first to see wins. The rest follow. Learn more at Alpha-sense.com. how I invest. The only example that I could really think of is Jeff Bezos. The reason Jeff Bezos made it work is he started from the very beginning. Right. He, you know, Mike Maykwells talked about this, how he picked his LPs for the first couple of funds.
Starting point is 00:10:51 He said, you need to find your champions. Right. Some people focus too much on selling and not enough on picking. Right. Who you're right partners in. And I think Bezos did it from the beginning. He hired the people around him from the beginning. The antithesis of this was actually Facebook.
Starting point is 00:11:07 If you remember, I got to sit down with Roger McNamee from Elevation. He sat me down in the chair where convinced Mark Zuckerberg not to take the billion dollar deal. Everybody around Mark Zuckerberg on him take the deal. And he fired most of those people. I know. I saw one more my friends. I'm not going to name names. It's as much as a financial thing.
Starting point is 00:11:24 It's a cultural thing. And that's about his alignment again. Well, there's also a mental aspect to it. What does that mean? Why is it that I'm also first generation immigrant? Why is it that immigrants have that much power and have that much success in Silicon Valley despite all the things going against?
Starting point is 00:11:42 And I think one of them is being different and being an other cannot be caught. Right. You have to feel it. And a lot of people you grow up in the environment you became comfortable with to leave that place of comfort where everything is familiar to, to go to something completely different.
Starting point is 00:11:57 And you can immediately feel you're an outsider, you're the other, and try to see through that and analyze that and figure out how to fit in, but how to also be different by being able to step out, not training doing that. And that's why I would like the Gladwell's books, 10,000 hours. You have that training when you were 13, you're 10,000, when you have to work.
Starting point is 00:12:14 You have 10,000 hours of thinking that you're different, but how do you turn into advantage? That is invaluable to work in the environment. That's tough, that's unfamiliar, where your view is a minority point of view. 50% was the last statistic that I saw in terms of first or second generation immigrants venture funded.
Starting point is 00:12:29 And then you add to that, the tealism about human beings are so memat, and so so into pleasing others and making other people feel good that you almost have to be neurodivergent in order to go against their grain. So now you have 50%. Now you have,
Starting point is 00:12:43 I'm not going to ask you for a percentage of neurodivergent founders, but some percentage of that. And then what's left, other obviously modes of thinking and other types of diversity as well outside of just being an immigrant, then the question becomes,
Starting point is 00:12:55 can a regular person start a $100 billion company with no trauma, with no background, with no otherness in their past? And I'm not sure that that's possible. I tried to think as you mentioned this. Any normal founders in your portfolio? Who have, I think a normal, quote on,
Starting point is 00:13:11 normal founder can get to that half a billion, 200, maybe branch. Yeah, and branch is also different. That's the same. You put up your bed. You're a whole person stranger. That was not going. And I then have the wisdom.
Starting point is 00:13:25 You know, that's right. When the first time I heard about it, going to Dubai C, I'm like, oh, that's the stupidest idea ever. And but you see that how the world changes to the adaps to that. Okay, okay, I was wrong before. You got to make changes when I'm still investing him later. So, thank God we are, you got to have the thick face to say, yeah, I was wrong.
Starting point is 00:13:43 And we got to evolve and be able to iterate that is also extremely important. And the corollary to that is that, yes, to be different, give you an edge, but also, are you intellectually honest? It's not about pride. It's about figuring out, look, everything from first principles, what did I miss before? How does it change the way I think about things? That's changing the original assumptions to see what does the output look like the second time. I had a fascinating conversation with Eric Scott, who was at Founders Fond. And he explained, within Founders Fund, they have this unique ability to look at every round from complete first principles.
Starting point is 00:14:14 In other words, there are companies where you were wrong to pass on the seed, you were right. When you find something that just fits right, you end up wearing it more than anything else. And for me lately, that's been my rag and bone, Miramar jeans. What really stood out to me is that they look like traditional denim, but honestly feel more like sweatpants. They've got that clean, structured look, but with a level of comfort that makes them easy to wear all day, I've been wearing them pretty consistently, whether I'm recording, traveling, or just out there during the day, and they become one of those go-to pieces I don't really have to think about. Even after long days, they don't feel restrictive, which is something I didn't realize I was missing until I started wearing them regularly.
Starting point is 00:14:51 With rag and bone, it's not just about one pair of jeans, it's about having reliable staples in your closet. You could dress them up a bit or keep a casual, and they just work. The washes are clean, the cut is sharp, and they hold it. up really well over time. It's that balance of comfort and structure that makes them stand out compared to most jeans. If you're looking to upgrade your denim, I definitely recommend checking out rag and bone miramar jeans. You get 20% off sitewide at www.org-rack dash bone.com using code invest. Again, that's 20% off at www. www.R-A-G-B-O-N-E dot com with code invest. When you find something that just fits right, you end up wearing it more than anything else.
Starting point is 00:15:29 And for me lately, that's been my rag and bone, Miramar. jeans. What really stood out to me is that they look like traditional denim, but honestly, feel more like sweatpants. They've got that clean, structured look, but with a level of comfort that makes them easy to wear all day, I've been wearing them pretty consistently, whether I'm recording, traveling, or just out there during the day, and they become one of those go-to pieces I don't really have to think about. Even after long days, they don't feel restrictive, which is something I didn't realize I was missing until I started wearing them regularly. With rag and bone, it's not just about one pair of jeans. It's about having reliable staples in your
Starting point is 00:16:01 closet. You could dress them up a bit or keep a casual and they just work. The washes are clean, the cut is sharp and they hold up really well over time. It's that balance of comfort and structure that makes them stand out compared to most jeans. If you're looking to upgrade your denim, I definitely recommend checking out Rag and Bone Miramar jeans. You get 20% off sitewide at www.org.org-d-B-W-Bone.com using code invest. Again, that's 20% off at www.org.org When you find something that just fits right, you end up wearing it more than anything else. And for me lately, that's been my rag and bone, Miramar jeans. What really stood out to me is that they look like traditional denim, but honestly feel more
Starting point is 00:16:42 like sweatpants. They've got that clean, structured look, but with a level of comfort that makes them easy to wear all day, I've been wearing them pretty consistently, whether I'm recording, traveling, or just out there during the day, and they become one of those go-to pieces I don't really have to think about. Even after long days, they don't feel restrictive, which is something I didn't realize I was missing until I started wearing them regularly. With rag and bone, it's not just about one pair of jeans.
Starting point is 00:17:05 It's about having reliable staples in your closet. You could dress them up a bit or keep a casual, and they just work. The washes are clean, the cut is sharp, and they hold up really well over time. It's that balance of comfort and structure that makes them stand out compared to most jeans. If you're looking to upgrade your denim, I definitely recommend checking out rag and bone Miramar jeans. You get 20% offsitewide at www.org-rack-bone.com using code invest. that's 20% off at www.
Starting point is 00:17:32 www.org dash bO-N-E dot com with code invest. To pass on the A, you're right to pass on the B, and then you were wrong again. And just the ability to constantly reevaluate your priors and think not in a deterministic manner, but in a probabilistic manner, most we see Scant Crasper head.
Starting point is 00:17:50 I mean, the common theme these days is, you know, power a lot. And that's not rocket science. You know, we're in a business of hitting home runs, ideally, you know, with base loaded. So it's the slowing position, not matter. But how do you reconcile that with being stuff early in a very healthy ownership level?
Starting point is 00:18:07 And a lot of times you have healthy ownership on stuff that's more second tier, not the best tier. And so we have doubled down the best tier companies versus to find the next second tier companies, but you own a lot and tell people your great early state investor. How do you reconcile those two? It is not the easiest thing. And for me, I'm not ashamed to admit it. I don't have the highest ownership in the companies that you mentioned are great names,
Starting point is 00:18:29 but I feel like when they're early enough, we got to be in them for the right reasons. And I wish I can put more money in them. But, you know, we have a partnership to talk about all these kind of the issues. And, you know, in the previous era of thinking, having own more in this company is better. These days, because some of the companies,
Starting point is 00:18:46 like that going to be so much bigger, you almost have to see that, okay, these are the best companies. And being in them is important and we have to pay more money in. We should because the upside from the point of second entry, a third entry is still like 10x. So you've got to do that.
Starting point is 00:18:59 And that is not easy for most people in the mid. That's what you should be doing. We're over 300 episodes into this podcast. And early on, I used to ask this question. People would answer the same way. And then after a while, I still didn't understand it, but I stopped asking it. The question is people always talk about your fund size is your strategy. And they talk a lot about ownership.
Starting point is 00:19:18 But why does it not just come down to valuation? I understand you can't just invest $25,000 and hope it at 100 X's. But it seemed like everybody was just using different terminology to back into being valuation sensitive at the early stage. Why do people talk about it in terms of ownership and fund construction? Why do they overcomplicate what I think is a fairly straightforward? Because it's so hard to have winners. And when you have winners, at least at that point in time, all LPs ask,
Starting point is 00:19:45 what is your ownership level? So I'll have 10 bets, 15 bets or 20 bets. You got 102 right and you own 20% each and ends up being, you know, not 100x, but 500x or 1,000x as an early very early seed investor. Then the math works out. But isn't that backwards looking in that if you just had 30 companies instead of 15 and you own 10% instead of 20%? Isn't that the same thing outside of just trying to recreate this analogy where you would know the one company that you should own more? Right.
Starting point is 00:20:10 You could do that, but the challenge is that are you sure your 15 will be captured enough diversity to give you a chance to hit the one that's really big? 30 seem to give you a higher chance of at least hitting one of them big. So if you want to hit 30, then you also want to make sure you own enough each one with 30, which means that enterprise has to be lower to give you a chance to do that if the fun size is fixed. So I can see the argument. And I can say I'm a great seed investor because it's not how I do who living, even though like Xiaomi and Red Note and some of the stuff that got in, it was below $100 million in valuation. And they end up making a lot of money if it ends up being big.
Starting point is 00:20:43 So I can see the argument of what you have shared. But it's not easy to find stuff that really works until a little bit later. And having the flexibility to do that is very, very important in my mind. And also knowing where to hunt, where the world's heading, therefore you're going to spend more time doing that. is a luxury that a lot of people don't want to try to bet on because they don't know what could be big, what could be interesting, so they end up spreading about it.
Starting point is 00:21:04 Everyone's trying to figure out who's going to win the world of AI. In terms of AI Native apps, how do you build for this constantly evolving LLMs? It's very, very difficult. And I think a lot of founders out there where AI Native companies constantly think about that. And that's probably the number of reason, as you can imagine, keep them up at night.
Starting point is 00:21:24 When you want to be on the token path, if the models are improving, your product builds on top of that, as models, events, your product also gets a lot better and generally a lot of value, like a cursor, like livable and so forth for coding. But the worry is that if cloud and cloud code and cloud cowork gets so much better, then what is the room that is left available for you to do through that value? One way in theory is that the adoption at a user level vary. The people more technical, the people are a lot less technical.
Starting point is 00:21:51 So if you simplify the UI and reach more mass market users, there's a chance you can stay ahead of the UI of something more technical from Cloud. It's possible. Another way is that you actually own system of records for data, what is transactions, content, what have you. Another way is that you actually make the final buy and sell decisions, risking the balance sheet of individual household or enterprise. And therefore, I don't want to touch that kind of balance sheet risk.
Starting point is 00:22:21 So these are ways I can think of. And then lastly, have all the domain knowledge, or something that's more regulated. of the compliance factors and so forth, and Elm. Don't want to spend time doing that. Actually, I think about it. There's another one more physical AI is possible because in physical eye, one can argue,
Starting point is 00:22:36 it's not easy to have one model that rules at all, one regular than rules at all. Therefore, in a different situation, can you exist where it's harder for Elm to go after you. These are the things I can think of today, but, you know, a year from now, two years, month, a year from now, who knows? And that's the best guess we can come with
Starting point is 00:22:48 at the current moment. Physical AI blows my mind. What's exciting to you about physical AI? It's definitely lacks behind software AI. And in the U.S. when you still have the best, engineers in the world want to come here to build amazing companies. And 70% of U.S. economy is tied to services.
Starting point is 00:23:03 And it is not, it doesn't like a rocket scientist to know that, you know, serving the developers build B2B enterprise applications is the most value-generating activity in a service-oriented economy. But the rest of the world is not like that. And the rest of the world is over 90% of GDP outside of the U.S. is tied to physical industries. And therefore, if you also think that the second rule, not like they have one model without rules at all, then for each different kind of physical industry,
Starting point is 00:23:28 there may be different models that can merge the works in for that industry. At least there's a shorter path of commercialization that's less competent intensive together. You know, God bless Lekoon for coming up with something interesting and big and he could still do that or world models or pie. But outside of that,
Starting point is 00:23:45 more likely it's going to be around the world will be smaller models for specific things and that give more people have a chance to win. And that's what to me is exciting for venture as well. And what have you turned 180 degrees on? recently. Over the last 20 years, I went to Asia, I went to China in 2005 when it was not obvious thing to do. I came back with my wife in 2013 when China was hot and people in town were telling me why are you leaving. And then from 2013 to 2018, I rode the consumer internet wave here
Starting point is 00:24:16 in the U.S and became an investor in saying like Airbnb and Peloton and so forth. But from 2018 to 23, it was hard. It was hard to be a consumer investor and find stuff that work. We try fintech, we tried hardware. It's just a hard time. But 2023D now with AI, it becomes very interesting. And thank God I can apply it while I learned from consumer internet to investing in Anthropic. So picking, you know, confidence that can be capital winner. I think it always be kind of being my thing. I may not have the knowledge in each year to know what makes sense that most in time in terms of the specific knowledge.
Starting point is 00:24:46 This is why you have a partnership that works together. I'm very thankful to have colleagues on our infrastructure side who have more domain knowledge than I do. And I bring different perspective at the table and as a team, our goals to make decisions better than anybody, but individually each one of this can be. Maybe you could double click on. What did you learn about being a consumer investor that made you discover Anthropic? As a consumer investor,
Starting point is 00:25:06 you want to find that positive feedback loop that can eventually lead to a network effect. And when thethropic, the fact that some developers were using it, it can get smarter from some people, smart people using it what the purpose was for. And that feedback loop,
Starting point is 00:25:22 I saw that way, TikTok. I invest in musically, encourage them to get sold. everybody under the sun by Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, everybody passed on Musical. The founder actually preferred to sell
Starting point is 00:25:35 to an American company and nobody wanted it. And Biden was strategic. They want to go global so they acquired musically. And seeing what the TikTok algorithm did for Musically as they became one app and take an algorithm, be able to just look at what you do with each video and take that,
Starting point is 00:25:50 to figure out, build models, to figure out what kind of user you could be and therefore other users who have your son of a profile would end up choosing something similar to want to look at and use that to continue to refine a model of who you are as a user. That kind of approach actually could make sense in the B2B world and Anthropic was probably the best at leveraging that
Starting point is 00:26:08 to figure out what users are one to four and therefore leverage the positive feedback without even creating a networking effect. You figured out that Anthropic and LMs were a network effect business. If I did. I thought it was all about gaining users. Scale, scale, scale. scale, Arpoo, all those things. Anthropic was about getting to be the best system.
Starting point is 00:26:29 For a long time, people thought that this idea of benchmarking and being the best on the benchmarks was a fallacy. But if you were in the intermust loop of the training data and you had that as a sustainable competitive advantage, this assumption that all the loops are just commodities was a false assumption. Right. And you know it was very well. Two years ago, everyone thought the albums would be commoditized. There's some of the models worldwide that it will be hard to differentiate. Everybody can match each other and jump over each other into the benchmarks. Clearly, that's not the case. You started a few of your own companies in your early 2000.
Starting point is 00:26:58 Does that still affect how you invested in? I was a failed founder twice, co-founder twice. And that was a very humbling experience. At the same time, it's so much of what's alike to walking the shoes of being a founder and all the emotions and the things that we missed, the things we learned, some decisions that should have done differently in hindsight, all that training. If I didn't have that, it was zero chance in hell. I would have been a successful investor.
Starting point is 00:27:26 So that's why when we invest in companies, I also like founders who did not make it work the first time or a small outcome the first time. So they are very hungry to take all the lessons they have to make it work a second time or the third time. And then I feel five times, six times. Maybe that's not a right thing for you to do. But it's just see how people react to things that didn't go well
Starting point is 00:27:46 and learn from that is extremely important to know this person go along. kind of ties in with what we're talking earlier about, but as Open AI in Anthropic and Grog and Gemini get bigger and more efficient and smarter, what other themes are you excited about that leverage the growth and the improvements of LOMs? I mean, Elon has done with this big companies combined into one. Now you see Amazon buying Global Star connecting what's on the ground here to what's out there through satellite. That is going to become a paradigm to compete in going forward. Those two systems are obvious. I'm very curious who's going to be number three. And even a number three player in that industry can be an enormous outcome. So that's a very copy of intensive business, not the era we played in.
Starting point is 00:28:35 But I'm very curious, it would be a number three player. Now, Jensen Wing just talked about this, the four different layers of the AI stack. Everybody's focused on the LLM stack. There's obviously the app stack. There's the chip stack. There's the energy to create the chips. Those are the four stacks. Right. And energy minds is people talk about an ex, but our, as a, as a, for American government or economy, we're not doing enough to improve that. And in the long run, that's going to make a huge difference on the upside we can get to. So it will be very interesting to see how we, how we do it. But also will say that, you know, how US, how we build our strengths in our alliance with Japan with other countries that are stronger than lessing manufacturing to also may have better, more efficient energy sources where utilization, we got to figure out way to partner.
Starting point is 00:29:19 or more with other countries to give us the best of my age as well. What's your information diet look like today? I'm not someone who will listen to a lot of podcasts. I should, but I don't. What fascinates me when I look at stuff that I want to consume is a lot of history, biographies, and videos. One of the ones that I like the most is Sarah Payne from War College. The way she analyzed all the geopolitics and the historical bottles and boars and rise and fall
Starting point is 00:29:49 of regions. Fascinating me. I'm all having gone to Stanford and really love humanities and love studying a Renaissance, age of Santae Revolution, age of discovery, all that thing. It's just,
Starting point is 00:30:02 it's so interesting to me to see whatever you have today. Sure, even the Roman Empire, even the British Empire, everything rise and falls. How do you learn from that to help us to be able to sustain the advantage we have today and build on that?
Starting point is 00:30:13 So we don't end up being the high point of our system. Those are the things that to me are more enduring. and more interesting and that really keep me going and apply what I see there to what I see every single day. But I feel those are instances of underlying principles that can be the pattern you can detect over a longer period of human history. You're talking about thousands of years, if not tens of thousands of years of data that seems to be a much better data set and source for whatever we want to call a larger large or not which models in your own brain. Speaking of history, cause and effect, you were early in Airbnb and by dance and a lot of these top consumer companies.
Starting point is 00:30:51 Do you feel that consumer is deterministic that there were to have been winners in the space where we're not for perhaps these really great founders? The reason we launched a prosumer AI40 list, the NASDAQ yesterday, with the help of 30 other great VC firms and JP Morgan and Google Cloud and Falkic and Floyd is that just think back three years ago, the first pro-prosumer user on TatsubT or on cloud, I mean, an open-air team was shocked how popular chapter to be became overnight.
Starting point is 00:31:22 And if you look at the prosumer who use that, they're usually the first adopters of innovations and so forth. So what are we going to call them consumer or prosumer? That segment, that's very willing to be the first to try something new. They're a very, very interesting group to really study and spend time with. And that one makes this job so much fun. I'd be doing this for 20 years and still wake up every single day, just bewildered and amazed at what are the new things that we haven't seen and learned.
Starting point is 00:31:47 and be able to have the humility learned from prosomers who are the first user in many things, it is a privilege. Well, Hans, your absolute legend. Thanks so much for jumping on. Looking forward to doing this again. Thank you for great questions. Love your podcast.

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