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Peter teal says Twitter is going to outlast the New York Times
And there was the one day where NVIDIA had the largest market cap in the world earlier this year. And I do think that represented a phase transition. Once that happened, they probably had, um, more attention than was good.
I think a year ago, two years ago, in retrospect, NVIDIA would have been a good buy, you know, I think at this point, everybody it's, it's, it's sort of too obvious that they're making too much money. Everyone's going to try to copy them on, on the chip side. Maybe that's straightforward to do. Maybe it's not, but, but that's, you know, I'd say probably, um, you should, you should, if you, if you want to figure out the AI thing, you should, you should not be asking this question about, um, you k
They're, they're making, they're, I think everybody else is losing money collectively. Yeah. Everyone else is just spending money on, on the computer. So it's, it's one, it's one company that's making, I mean, maybe there's a few other people that are making some money.
if I were in your place, I would still get the business out of China. I would get the computers out, the people out. I'd completely decouple it from ByteDance because TikTok will be banned 24 hours after the Taiwan invasion.
my intuition for what is going to happen without making any normative judgments at all is it is going to decouple.
I think it's probably quite tricky even to invest in Chinese businesses.
I certainly would not try to invest in a company that competed domestically inside China. I think that's virtually impossible.
Um, again, I, I, I, I, I, I would say, um, my, again, my, my, my, my big, my big qualification is, you know, my model is AI feels like it does feel uncomfortably close to the bubble of 1999. So I'm, we haven't invested that much in it. Um, and, uh, I, I, I want to have more clarity in investing, but, uh, but the, the, uh, the simple simplistic question is, you know, who, who's going to make money? Um, you know, I think a year ago, two years ago, in retrospect, NVIDIA would have been a good buy,
if you're at a startup where things work too easily, which I think was the way most people say at Microsoft or Google would have experienced it, you learn the lesson that it's actually easy to build a great company.
Twitter had such a great fundamental idea that um you know whether it was very badly managed or somewhat badly managed or whether you're in favor of smoking pot or against smoking pot, it just didn't matter because the um the great um idea um sort of carried the day on so many other things.
I suspect that if if the EU goes after Google um this will probably be a sign that uh maybe maybe the search monopolies reaching a natural end since the government seem to time the point at which they intervene when when these things are about to naturally die anyway.
Google would have been described as a search engine in 1998. People have said, why do we need another search engine? We already have 20 in that category. And what was the first machine powered search and the page rank algorithm was actually the key differentiating thing.
Larry didn't buy it to shut it down.
starting a search company, that would be tough because Google's a really tough, uh, company to go up against.
Well, it's it's pretty core to Apple. I would argue it's not that core to Google.
Google at its is fundamentally just a search engines, just a search company. That's where 98% of the revenue comes from. And then I think um it Google always likes to brand itself as a all-purpose technology company. They're driving self-driving cars. You have Google glasses. You have, um, phone operating systems, balloons in outer space, but um but but really 98% of it's a search engine. Everything else is is is probably a distraction.
I suspect the fears are a little bit overdone at this point. I think that uh I think you know full strong AI is still you know in my my judgment somewhat further away than people think.
we had a we had an LP meeting at Founders Fund I believe in uh 2012 where Demis the Deep Mind CEO spoke
we were actually seed investors in Deep Mind
we on the Founders Fund side back in 2007, we thought, you know, we should start doing more in biotech, more in, you know, transportation, all these sort of futuristic sci-fi like technologies. And we've maybe 20 to 25% of the capital's been invested in that. You know, 75 to 80% is still it.
we do everything from seed to series A to B, C, D, you know, all the way all the way up the spectrum.
we once went at Founders Fund, we once went through a list of absolute rules and there were about 20 or 30 of them and they add up and eventually you don't look at anything anymore.
we were sort of less smoothly functioning, but a lot of people did feel ownership of the product and would um would raise their voices quite a bit if they felt things were off track.
I think it was a relatively entrepreneurial somewhat chaotic culture. We had a lot of very strong personalities.
the overarching lesson you learned going through a business like PayPal which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding the highle lesson was you can build a great company but it's hard.
So if you ask what is new about SpaceX rockets or Tesla cars, you know, all the components already existed at least in the initial designs and the critical thing was to pull them all together in a um in a new form. Um and and that sort of vertical integration um you know is is somewhat capital intensive which is why it's quite hard to get it financed but it's done very little and and so and then once it's done it's something that tends to get underrated.
And the fact is nobody believed electric cars were going to be viable or very few did.
Well, it's been a it's been an incredible success. I would I would never bet against Elon in anything.
it was definitely both Tesla and SpaceX were were companies um where the competition was really weak. So, uh you know, you were competing with these decrepit car companies in the US that had barely innovated in 50 years with space. It was um these these really bad aerospace, half government, half military, uh industrial complex type type entities that were again sort of very bad at innovating, very inefficient. So, uh, you know, if you're going to start it, you know, starting a search company, t
I think I think um I think having built this vertically integrated rocket company um it's now possible to innovate on that in ways that would be much harder if you had this super complicated uh subcontractor subcontractor system where all the components are bespoke and you can't innovate on the whole thing. So having integrated all the pieces um you can innovate if they if they get to reusability that is a that is an enormous breakthrough because it would cut costs you know 70 80%.
Um, it's probably, you know, if you sort of ask what is it that the innovation, what's what's been the innovation in SpaceX or Tesla, um, there are many different forms innovation takes. most common one we're used to is sort of you launch something and then you iteratively improve it. It's sort of this continuous improvement model. We occasionally have a modality of innovation where you have a big brilliant breakthrough like maybe Bitcoin where someone you know worked on it in a closet for 10 ye
Well, I'd say um well, it was definitely both Tesla and SpaceX were were companies um where the competition was really weak. So, uh you know, you were competing with these decrepit car companies in the US that had barely innovated in 50 years with space. It was um these these really bad aerospace, half government, half military, uh industrial complex type type entities that were again sort of very bad at innovating, very inefficient.
Peter teal says Twitter is going to outlast the New York Times