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we obviously come from a you know sort of more you know sort of libertarian you know sort of point of view where it's you know sort of light technology accelerate and you know sort of deal with the societal implications you know sort of later
with something like Devon, that, you know, sort of moat in the subways, there has been the sort of team and, you know, product they've been able to build before they'd really raised anything, right? Like, you know, that is just a fundamentally different group of, you know, sort of thinkers, you know, I know Scott Neil Wu, you know, sort of decently, you know, well, I was, you know, in audience when they were in seventh and eighth grade, you know, you know, winning math counts in front of everybo
the second investment after that is cognition labs with, you know, Devon, the, you know, basically only, you know, sort of truly functional AI agent, you know, to, you know, replace software engineers.
I think it's very clear that obviously Jensen Huang and Nvidia make lots of money, I think that will continue to be the case, probably for some period of time, you could maybe make the analogy that, hey, is this potentially like fiber in the mid 90s, where we think that there's semi infinite amounts of demand, but then actually once everybody puts in their capex, and there's, you know, diminishing marginal returns to increase scale, then everybody actually flattens out. And so you're projecting
ramp is never really been branding or tried to make itself an AI company. I think, you know, part of it is other competitors in that space have tried to brand themselves AI companies as a way to fundraise because their metrics stock rip has never really had to do that. And so, you know, they do use AI genuinely, because it improves their business, not as a marketing, you know, sort of stick.
The first is the number of net new RAMP customers that are choosing to begin investing in AI rather than currently expanding in it has actually roughly leveled off.
Well, I want to sort of first give a shout out to one of the best AI companies in our portfolio that generated that report, which is RAMP. And so I will say at Founders Fund, we generally don't believe in telling our companies how they should run themselves, what tools they should use, what makes it most effective. The one thing that we do tell them is we do tell them to all use RAMP.
I think for us, it really comes down to either teams like that, or fundamentally distribution, I think a lot of our, you know, sort of conviction around the open AI investment was the fact that they stepped into this distribution hack of chat GPT, it was totally unexpected. But to have the basically fastest growing, you know, consumer app in human history, to us, it was less of a bet on, you know, how much capital is this company raised, what is the scale of their models, etc, is that this is on
the only two AI investments that we've made is open AI, which is, you know, probably the sort of best called, you know, the late stage incumbent. And then, you know, the second investment after that is cognition labs with, you know, Devon, the, you know, basically only, you know, sort of truly functional AI agent, you know, to, you know, replace software engineers. And so, you know, it's not like we have 15 different investments across the category, it's, you know, where do you actually see, you
at Founders Fund, we generally don't believe in telling our companies how they should run themselves, what tools they should use, what makes it most effective. The one thing that we do tell them is we do tell them to all use RAMP.
One thing that I love about our crypto strategy at IFF is we allow people to run with very independent convictions. Myself, personally, crypto is not my area of expertise. It's explicitly an area that I sometimes critique extensively publicly on Twitter. But at the same time, I love the fact that we are strong, independent thinkers in this area. We don't let hype cycles really affect our investment strategy. As an example, in the true lowest part of the market when everybody was the most pessimi
if I were in Gwen Shotwell or Elon shoes, and you're like, Hey, I had, you know, sort of starship online today, is my immediate reaction going to be let me like 10x decrease the cost to see if that actually 20x is the demand? I don't think so. I think what you'll see is like, they basically just swap it in for Falcon 9 launches originally, keep the price point the same. And then maybe they tweak the prices a little bit down and sort of use that to test demand. And they'll probably just figure ou
there's not really a clear competitor to SpaceX. So you know, even if, you know, Elon gets Starship online, he's not going to immediately flow through all the, you know, cost benefit to every single aerospace company, he's going to capture a lot of those profits himself, because he's not going to be incentivized to, there's not any clear competition coming online, it's been basically eight years now, since the Falcon nine landed for the first time, nobody else has landed a rocket in the last eig
that's basically where we are in like, you know, the sort of the space economy where, you know, SpaceX and rocket lab and these groups are the equivalent of like AWS coming online and think about it to sort of how many net new business models that enabled were like, Uber never had to think about like, you know, server, you know, sort of scale up. And you know, what that meant, they could instead focus just on like, their front end application and like acquiring drivers, it's sort of the equivale
SpaceX has recently launched what's known as like the transporter series of rockets, where basically, rather than having to book a whole rocket yourself, you can now instead basically book an individual slot, like the equivalent of, you know, sort of Uber rideshare, and they make it pretty flexible of like, if you miss your ride, it's fine to like rebook and go on to, you know, sort of the next one, that's like three or four months later. And so now rather than before rockets were like, Oh my go
a SpaceX rocket had basically launched and landed four times in a row. And that to me was basically the marker of hey, the economics of this, like, you know, business model that I've been thinking about for the past decade finally makes sense where up until then, you know, everything was basically NASA sponsored on the International Space Station, it only made sense for the government to do is highly expensive, not possible to commercialize. But now Elon was launching landing rocks all time now
I would argue like Palantir, Andrel, Varda, Openstore, like all these companies are companies that would not exist in their current forms, if not basically for like the incubating partner.
Peter Thiel basically tells everybody at the firm like stop investing for six months
the sort of founders that choose to work with founders fund are predisposed to, you know, some level of, you know, being extremely aligned with, you know, Brian Armstrong. And so, you know, they sometimes can also use this as a bit of an excuse too, which like, Oh, well, we can't do x, y, or z initiative, because like, you know, founders fund is on our board. And like, obviously, like, they're gonna vomit all over that, but it's really like, the CEO just doesn't want to do it. But you know, he g
founders fund was very early to this trend, you know, in 2004, double down in 2016.
I would say our model is unique and distinctly different in that. I wouldn't say it's our practice to be regularly incubating companies. If you look at how often we're doing it over the past like 23 years, it's probably once every like three or four years on average, that an incubation is happening. And I typically say at Founders Fund, it's not, it's not our practice. We're only going to be doing it when there's like a handful of things that are true. One, when this company basically like would
Ryan Peterson, obviously, you know, somewhat different in that he started the company before joining, but he is still quite actively involved in Flexport. And he actually recently did an interview with Bloomberg or CNBC, uh, where he talked about how actually joining Founders Fund, uh, re-motivated him to like work even harder, uh, you know, at Flexport. So he's been, you know, sort of picking that up. Peter always has, you know, sort of some, you know, uh, you know, project going for a while. H
Yeah, still an investment partner. We at this point have almost half the team that are both investment partners and, you know, building companies. And so it's a thing that we actually, you know, are leaning into and is literally in the name, right? You know, Founders Fund, we want to be a fund filled with founders basically.