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

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 at 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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  Pons, 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 OpenAI and Anthropic. You chose Anthropic. What made you choose to invest in Anthropic at the time?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  I've been a consumer investor most of my life because the era that I've been in, whereas an investor, overlapped with the rise of mobile internet, not only here in the US, 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. So when it comes to OpenAI 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.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  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, you can see a lot of developers peeing clawed for codes for things. And Cursor and Lovable and others were bringing rapidly on top of that. For someone who's more of a 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 peeing you for things.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Over time, you can imagine, as I did, that Claw will get, quote unquote, smarter because of different folks, different developers and different verticals, asking them for codes. Each one needs to be tailored, over time, tailored 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 Claw will understand better and better what people are asking for, for the bigger 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. This is what I saw with Airbnb.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Um. All the best kind of consumer in the company over the last ten, fifteen, twenty years has a positive feedback loop that make them um 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 um Anthropic was open. I was being doing a bunch of different things and it was building the empire, which is great, good for them, but Anthropic was very focused on developer. When we decided investing in topic, DC just came out literally a few days earlier and the token cost on DC is a lot cheaper. So if the token cost in the in the US models, close models are more expensive, you have to take that to generate a lot of value. And what's the best value you could generate in economy like in the United States? It is building B two B application for enterprise use.

• 2:51David Weisburd?

  In full disclosure, I'm also investor. My thesis was around B two B versus B two C. 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, is that right?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Right. And it the network effect that was creating with all the developers keep on using it. Now, a lot of people end up, you know, twenty, thirty years ago, used Yahoo because Google embedded inside Yahoo, just getting smarter, smarter about people were searching for. So Yahoo was doing this in many different things, but what was most strategic at that point in time of one dot O was search. Was obvious at the time. Yahoo was doing so many things, mail, news, and you know, you can do whatever you can think of today. Yahoo had it back then. But the single most important thing that people back then really wanted was search and Google nailed that as part of Yahoo. And Bing tried to do this, you know, ten years later, it just, you know, it's too late, uh, even though Bing was great, amazing engineers, great, great model, but a great algorithm, but it didn't have the the feedback loop. And the network fact that Google had as part of Yahoo initially, and then when it spun out, continued to be able to capitalize on that.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  So those are kind of that that just remind me a while this Anthropic could have a chance to be hopefully bigger than than the opener who know how long it will take, but it's a pros they have makes sense.

• 4:01David Weisburd?

  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?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  I'll give you another example. Airbnb, March 2020, I was on a 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.

• 4:29David Weisburd?

  Great timing.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Great timing. The other three understandably poo-pooed Airbnb, poo-poo travel. Like, come on, that was one point in time. At some point, COVID is going to go away. Who knows how long it 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. And when a question was posed to me, I said, you know, staycation could be a thing. I know if I'm first principles, and most consumers, especially American consumers, cannot be cooped up in a house for two, three, four, five months at a time. People need a place to go. Sure, they cannot fly to Paris to London anymore, but people can drive. We all have cars. Going driving 50 miles, now 100 miles, 200 miles, we'll get to someplace where we can find a place to get something different. Now, who in that world can quickly pivot and have new

• 5:14Speaker 01

  inventory and supply that's in a different place, different location that was popular before? Only Airbnb 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 really needed it. Who knows if Airbnb can execute, but if Airbnb can pull it off, you will be them. Literally two days later, Airbnb made an announcement, had funding from Silver Lake, uncomfortable note, and then all the reservations were canceled, so that consumers benefited from not being on the hook to pay for these things. And Airbnb used that money to pay the hosts for the cancellations to keep them in the business. They had to let go unfortunately 25% of employees. At the same time, Airbnb went out of their

• 5:59Speaker 01

  way to help come up with a book. All the employees were unfortunately let go and helped to find a job, not that people can 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 when you 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 the practical terms, loyalty. And trust that you just won't be able to get easily anywhere else, anytime else.

• 6:29David Weisburd?

  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.

• 6:46David Weisburd?

  Do you see that evolving? Or is there any way to solve this issue of going public while also thinking long-term?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Ah, it's a good 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.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  It's really not easy, the grind of going through every quarter and focus on the question you're going to get every quarter on those earning calls. The 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 it on their best. I think the best person that I can think of, that can manage that and have the sort of the mental fortitude, and this is not a earth-shattering answer, is Chen Zhonghuan. I literally remember him, 2019, in COTU's East West Summit, where he talks about why GPUs matter and why GPU makes sense for the different kind of verticals that they're in. This is way before AI and before COVID.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  The way he talks about things and the way he thought about the world, the way he was being willing to make his bed and be lonely for 15 years doing that, that is a completely different world. And be able to know that you're right, other people are actually going to be wrong and be able to hold out view for 15 years like that, when it's kind of lonely, no one care about you, is something that just is very unusual. And to see someone like that with similar background as me, born in Taiwan, grew up outside of the US and then came to the US and had the chance to go to the best schools in the US and really benefit from the American system and get back as being the largest market cap company in the world as American, naturalized 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.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  But it's a lonely journey. And when I look at myself, my career, the places I've been to, a lot of choices are not popular, not understood at the time, but you gotta 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 thing. Even I did that as early stage in my career, just doing whatever was the hottest thing at the time, then realized that that does not work. You gotta be able to chart your own path and have a fortitude to do that. So, you know, it's very hard to do that in current environment. It takes a different kind of CEO to make that work.

• 8:51David Weisburd?

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• 9:35David Weisburd?

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• 10:18David Weisburd?

  alongside filings, broker research, news, and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts, turning raw conversations into comparable, auditable insight. Take advantage of AlphaSense AI-led expert calls now. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Learn more at alpha-sense.com/HowIInvest. 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 Mayfield's talked about this, how he picked his LPs for the first couple of funds. He said, "You need to find your champions." Right. Some people focus too much on selling and not enough on picking who your right partners are. And I think Bezos did it from the beginning. He hired the people around him from the beginning.

• 11:04David Weisburd?

  The antithesis of this was actually Facebook. If you remember, I got to sit down with Roger McNamee from Elevation. He sat me down in the in the chair where convinced Mark Zuckerberg not to take the billion dollar deal. Everybody around Mark Zuckerberg wanted him to take the deal. And he fired most of those people.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I know. I saw him on my friends. I'm not gonna name names.

• 11:23David Weisburd?

  It's as much of a financial thing, it's a cultural thing. I think there's also.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  That is alignment again.

• 11:28David Weisburd?

  Well, there's also a

• 11:31David Weisburd?

  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 that have that much success in Silicon Valley despite all the things going against them? I think one of them is being different and being an other cannot be off.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Right. You have to feel it. And a lot of people, you grew up in an environment you became comfortable with, to leave that place of comfort where everything's familiar to you, to go to something completely different, 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 be able to step out, not training, doing that. And that's why I like Gladwell's books, 10,000 hours. You have that training from when you're 13, you're 10, to all the way when you have to work, you have 10,000 hours of thinking that you're different, but how do you turn that into a vintage? That is invaluable to work in an environment that's tough, that's unfamiliar, where your view is minority point of view.

• 12:24David Weisburd?

  50% was the last statistic that I saw in terms of first or second generation immigrants venture funded. And then you add to that the nihilism about human beings are so memetic 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, I'm not gonna 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, just being an immigrant, then the question becomes, can a regular person start a hundred billion dollar company with no trauma, with no background, with no otherness in their past? And I'm not sure that that's possible.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I tried to think as you mentioned this.

• 13:06David Weisburd?

  Any normal founders in your portfolio?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Uh, who have, I think a normal, quote un, normal founder can get to the half a billion, two hundred.

• 13:15David Weisburd?

  Maybe Brian Chesky.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Um, and Brian Chesky is also, also different. You put on your bed, you know, you're a home for a stranger. That was not.

• 13:23David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And I didn't have the wisdom, you know, that's right. When the first time I heard about it, uh, going to Y C. I'm like, oh, that's the stupidest idea ever. And but you see that how the world changes too. That's that. Okay, okay. I was wrong before. You gotta make changes when I'm still investing in later. So, you know, thank God we are, you gotta have the a thick face to say, yeah, I was wrong and we got it. We gotta 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? Let's change your original assumptions to see what, what does the output look like the second time?

• 14:03David Weisburd?

  I had a fascinating conversation with Eric Scott, who is at Founder's Fund.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:07David Weisburd?

  And he, he explained, and within Founder's Fund, they have this unique ability to look at every round from complete first principles. In other words, there are companies where you were wrong to pass on the seed, you were right. One thing that I've learned from talking to hundreds of investors, founders and business leaders is that planning for the future isn't just about growing assets. It's also about protecting the people who matter most. Life comes with a lot of important milestones. Maybe you're buying a home, starting a family, planning for college, or simply thinking more intentionally about your financial future. As those responsibilities grow, it's worth making sure you protect those you love. Not sure what kind of life insurance you may need? Concerned about how much it may cost? Think life insurance is too complicated? Your local State Farm agent can help answer those questions.

• 14:50David Weisburd?

  They can help you explore your options for life insurance and choose coverage that you can adjust as your family's needs change over time. Financial protection for your loved ones when it matters most. Learn more about life insurance at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. One thing that I've learned from talking to hundreds of investors, founders and business leaders is that planning for the future isn't just about growing assets. It's also about protecting the people who matter most. Life comes with a lot of important milestones. Maybe you're. Buying a home, starting a family, planning for college, or simply thinking more intentionally about your financial future. As those responsibilities grow, it's worth making sure you protect those you love. Not sure what kind of life insurance you may need? Concerned about how much it may cost? Think life insurance is too complicated? Your local State Farm agent can help answer those questions.

• 15:34David Weisburd?

  They can help you explore your options for life insurance and choose coverage that you can adjust as your family's needs change over time. Financial protection for your loved ones when it matters most. Learn more about life insurance at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. One thing that I've learned from talking to hundreds of investors, founders, and business leaders is that planning for the future isn't just about growing assets, it's also about protecting the people who matter most. Life comes with a lot of important milestones. Maybe you're buying a home, starting a family, planning for college, or simply thinking more intentionally about your financial future. As those responsibilities grow, it's worth making sure you protect those you love. Not sure what kind of life insurance you may need? Concerned about how much it may cost? Think life insurance is too complicated? Your local State Farm agent can help answer those questions.

• 16:18David Weisburd?

  They can help you explore your options for life insurance and choose coverage that you can adjust as your family's needs change over time. Financial protection for your loved ones when it matters most. Learn more about life insurance at statefarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. To pass on the A, you were 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 species can't grasp their head.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, the common theme these days is a power law. And that's not rocket science. We're in a business of hitting home runs ideally with bases loaded. So it's a slogan that says not matter. But how do you reconcile that with being stuff early in a very healthy ownership level? And a lot of times you have healthy ownership of stuff that's more a second tier, not a best tier. And so we have to double down on the best tier companies versus find the next second tier companies, but you own a lot. And tell people you're great early stage 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. But I feel like when they're Early enough, we gotta be in them for the right reasons.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  And I wish I can put more money in them, but you know, we have the partnership to talk about all these kind of issues. And you know, in the previous era of thinking, putting, having own more in a company is better. These days, because some of the companies like them can be so much bigger. You almost have to see that, okay, these are the best companies and being in them is important. And have to pile more money in, you should, because the upside from the point of second entry or third entry is still like 10x. So you gotta do that. And that is not easy for most people in the mid. That's what you should be doing.

• 17:57David Weisburd?

  We're over 300 episodes into this podcast and early on I used to ask this question. People would answer the same, same way. And then after a while, I still didn't understand it, but I stopped asking it.

• 18:06David Weisburd?

  The question is, people always talk about your fund size is your strategy and they talk a lot about ownership. But why does it not just come down to valuation? I understand you can't just invest $25,000 and hope it 100x'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?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Because it's so hard to have winners. And when you have winners, at least at that point in time, a lot of LPs ask, well, what is your ownership level? So out of 10 bets, 15 bets or 20 bets, you got one or two right and you own 20% of 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.

• 18:53David Weisburd?

  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?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Right. You could do that, but the challenge is that, are you sure your 15 really capture 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 of the 30, which means that entry price has to be lower to give you a chance to do that. If the fund size is fixed. So I can see the argument and, uh, and I'm not, I can't say I'm a great seed investor. Cause it's not ideal for living, even though like Xiaomi and Red Note and some of the stuff I got in, it was below a hundred million dollars valuation. And they Making a lot of money if it ends up being big. So I can see the argument what what you have you have shared. But it's a it is 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.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  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 what could be big. What could be interesting. So end up spreading the.

• 19:59David Weisburd?

  Everyone's trying to figure out who's going to win in the world of AI. In terms of AI native apps. How do you build for this constantly evolving L L Ms?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  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 more reason, as you can imagine, keep them up at night. One, you want to be on a token path. If the model's improving, your product builds on top of that. As models events, your product also gets a lot better and generate a lot of value like a cursor, like level ball and so forth for coding. But the worry is that if cloud and cloud code and cloud cowork, it's so much better than what is the room that is left available for you to do. And through that value, one way in theory is that

• 20:41Speaker 01

  the adoption at a user level vary. The people more technical, the people a lot less technical. So if you simplify the UI and reach more mass users, mass market users, there's a chance you can stay ahead of the UI of a more something more technical from cloud possible. Another way is that you actually own a system of records for data, what is transactions, content, what have you. And another way is that you actually make the final buy and sell decisions, risking the balance sheet of of individual household or enterprise. And therefore, and L M don't want to touch that kind of balance sheet risk. So these are the ways I can think of. And then lastly,

• 21:20Speaker 01

  have all the domainology or something that's more regulated of the compliance factors and so forth. And L M don't want to spend time doing that. Actually, I think about this. And now one more physical AI is possible because in physical AI, one can argue it's not easy to have one model that rules it all, one really rules it all. Therefore, in different situation, can you exist where it's harder for L M to go after you? These are the things I can think of today, but you know, a year from now, two years, multiple years from now, who knows? And that's the best guess we can come with at the current moment.

• 21:44David Weisburd?

  Physical AI blows my mind. What's exciting to you about physical AI?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Physical AI, it definitely lacks behind software AI. And in the US, we still have the best engineers in the world want to come here to build amazing companies. And 70% of US economy is tied to services. And it's not, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that 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 US is tied to physical industries. And therefore, if you also think that the second rule, not like they have one model that rules it all, then for each different kind of physical industry, there may be different models that can emerge that work sense for that industry. At least there's a shorter path to commercialization that's less capital intensive give there.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  You know, God bless Lacoon for coming up with something interesting and big, and he could still do that. Or world models or Pi. But sure, outside of that, more likely is 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.

• 22:50David Weisburd?

  And what have you turned 180 degrees on recently?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  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 China were telling me, why are you leaving? And then from 2013 to 2018, I rode the consumer internet wave here in the US and became an investor in something like Airbnb and Peloton and so forth. But from 2018 to 2023, it was hard. It was hard to be a consumer investor and find stuff that worked. We tried fintech, we tried hardware, it's just hard time. And but 2023 to now, with AI, it becomes very, very interesting. And thank God I can apply what I learned from consumer internet to investing in a topic. So picking companies that can be capital winner, I think always be kind of be my thing.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  I may not have the knowledge in each year to know what makes sense that most in time in terms of the specific knowledge. That's 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 to the table and as a team, our goal is to make decisions better than individually each one of us can be.

• 23:53David Weisburd?

  Maybe you could double click on. What did you learn about being a consumer investor that made you discover Anthropic?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  As a consumer investor, you want to have find that positive feedback loop that can eventually lead to a network effect. And with Anthropic, the fact that some developers were using it, it can get smarter from how some people, smart people using it, what the purpose was for. And that feedback loop, I saw that way TikTok. I invest musically, encourage them to get sold. Everybody under the sun, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, everybody passed on musically. It was not, the founder actually preferred to sell to an American company and nobody wanted it. And BIDAN 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 out algorithm, be able to just look at what you do with each video and take that,

• 24:44Speaker 01

  figure out, build models to figure out what kind of user you could be. And therefore, other users who have similar profile would end up choosing something similar to want to look at and use that to computer refine to a model of who you are as a user. That kind of, that kind of approach actually could make sense in the B2B world. And Anthropic was popular, the best at leveraging that to figure out what users are among the four and therefore leverage the positive feedback loop to now eventually creating a networking effect.

• 25:09David Weisburd?

  You figured out that Anthropic and LMs were a network effect business.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  If I remember, I did.

• 25:14David Weisburd?

  Where Anthropic is a research. I thought it was all about gaining users and.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Scale, scale, scale.

• 25:18David Weisburd?

  Scale, ARPU, all those things.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:21David Weisburd?

  Anthropic was about getting to be the best system. For a lot of time, for a long time, people thought that this idea of bench maxing and being the best on the benchmarks was a fallacy.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:30David Weisburd?

  But if you're in the innermost 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.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  And he knows very well, two years ago, everyone thought LMs would be commoditized. There are so many models worldwide that it will be hard to differentiate. Everybody can match each other and jump over each other in terms of benchmarks. Clearly, that's not the case.

• 25:50David Weisburd?

  You started a few of your own companies in your early 2000s.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:52David Weisburd?

  Does that still affect how you invested?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  I was a failed founder twice, co-founder twice. And that was a very humbling experience. At the same time, it just taught me so much of what's it like to walk in 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, there was zero chance in hell I would have been a successful investor. 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 a third time. And then I even fail five times, six times, maybe it's not, maybe that's not the right thing for you to do.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  But it's just see how people react to things that didn't go well. And learn from that is extremely important to know if this person go, go long.

• 26:47David Weisburd?

  Kind of ties in with what we're talking earlier about, but as OpenAI and Anthropic and Grok and Gemini get bigger and more efficient and smarter. What other themes are you excited about that leverage the growth and improvements of L M's?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  I mean, Elon has done with this, we 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 the going forward. Those two seasons are obvious. I'm very curious who's going to be number three. And even the number three player in that industry can be enormous outcome. So that's a very capital intensive business, not the era, the era we played in. But I'm very curious, it's will be a number three player.

• 27:31David Weisburd?

  Johnson Wang just talked about this, the four different layers of the A I stack. Everybody's focused on the L M 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.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Right. And energy wise, it's some people talk about on X, 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, how we, how we do it. But also we'll say that, you know, how U S, how we built our strength and our alliance with Japan with other countries that are stronger in manufacturing. To also may have better, more efficient energy sources where you position, we got to figure out a way to partner more with other countries to give us the best advantage as well.

• 28:18David Weisburd?

  What's your information diet look like today?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  I'm not someone who will listen to a lot of podcasts. I should, but I don't. What fascinates me when I, when I look at stuff that I want to consume is a lot of history, biographies and videos. One of the ones I like the most is Sarah Payne from War College. The way she analyze all the geopolitics and the historical battles and wars and, and rise and fall of regions fascinate me. I'm always having gone to Stanford and really love humanities and love studying a Renaissance, age of scientific revolution, age of discovery, all that thing. It just, it's so interesting to me to see whatever you have today. Sure, even Roman Empire, even the Great British Empire, everything rise and fall.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  How do you learn from that to help us to be able to sustain the advantage we have today and build on that? So we don't end up being, being the high point of our, our system. Those are the things that to me are more enduring and more interesting and that really keep me going in a part of what I see there to what I see every single day. Cause I feel those are instances of underlying principles that can be the pattern you can detect over a longer period of, 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 you want to call it, larger large models you all around.

• 29:36David Weisburd?

  Speaking of history, cause and effect.

• 29:40David Weisburd?

  You were early in Airbnb and ByteDance and a lot of these top consumer companies. Do you feel that consumer is deterministic, that there would have been winners in the space, whether or not for perhaps these really great founders?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Recently we launched a consumer AFOD list with Nasdaq yesterday with the help of 30 other great VC firms and JP Morgan and Google Cloud and, and Floppy and it's Lloyd. Is that just think back three years ago, the first pro, prosumer user on chat GPT or on Claude. I mean, open ad team was shocked how popular chat GPT became overnight. And we look at the prosumer who use that, they're the, usually the first adopters of innovations and so forth. So whether you want to call it consumer or prosumer, that segment, that's very willing to be the first to try something new. They are very, very interesting group to really study and spend time with. And that what makes this job so much fun. I've been doing this for 20 years and still wake up every single day just bewildered.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  And amazed at what are the new things that we haven't seen, haven't learned? And be able to have the humility to learn from consumers who are the first to use many things is a privilege.

• 30:48David Weisburd?

  Well, Hans, you're an absolute legend. Thanks so much for jumping on and looking forward to doing this again.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you for your great questions. Love your podcast.