FULL INTERVIEW: Anjney Midha on Fixing AI’s Biggest Bottleneck

This is our full conversation with Anjney Midha, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss his thesis behind AMP and why he believes compute is the most constrained and valuable resource in the AI economy, how billions of dollars in underutilized compute are creating a massive inefficiency that his firm is aiming to solve by building a coordinated “compute grid,” and why he’s structuring AMP as both an infrastructure and capital platform to back the next generation of AI labs, unlock scientific breakthroughs, and accelerate progress across the entire ecosystem. Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  First time with his new fund AMP PBC. He's here in the waiting room. He's here with us in the TV panel.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  A man that finds generational run.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Yes. Generation.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  It's getting started, guys. No, generational run is used for people who are retiring.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That's true. That's true.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a, I think it's appropriate to, I think it's important to recognize when you're on a generational run that you realize you have to actually level up even further if you want to stay on the same trajectory.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, cause if you just get complacent, then.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's important to like count the chickens before they hatch. Like, that's what you're saying?

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, the opposite. Anyway, it's great, great to have you back on the show.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, fun to, um, but yeah, catch us up to speed on.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, when, yeah, when did the fund launch? Uh, what, you know, what's the strategy? Uh, and, uh, yeah, like, like, walk us through like the current thesis for how you want to actually develop the firm.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  No, I think we should talk about something more interesting. Let's talk about eBay. Let's talk about eBay.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. What you got?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  So, so here's what I'm, and I want you guys to kind of spar with me, right? I looked at, you know, Ryan did this CNBC interview and everybody's like binging me and saying, oh my God, this makes no sense, blah, blah. And, and so here's my, my take on it. Okay. Which is that, like, if you read the GameStop deck, like carefully for eBay, most of what's been said about the deal in the last 48 is basically totally wrong. I, I read, I was just before jumping on, I was reading Michael Burry's piece on it, which you guys should check out. And he's right that the leverage is pretty tight, but I think he's answering the, the wrong question. And so was Ryan on CNBC where he's, you know, they keep asking him like, where's the cash? How are you going to fund it?

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. 50% cash, 50% stock, 50% stock. Like, I, I don't think the question, the question isn't can GameStop afford eBay? The question is whether the underlying business actually works, and I think it does, but not for the reason I was expecting Ryan to pitch.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  So if you, if you pull up eBay's 10K from February.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Fiscal 25, and I did not understand this on Reddit, eBay spent $2.4 billion on marketing. How many new users did they get for that? I mean, you guys are marketers, so you understand. 1 million.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  That's crazy. The user base went from one, a hundred and thirty-four million users to a hundred and thirty-five million users after spending two point four billion on marketing.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  So, and that's basically, they're basically, you, you would have to imagine they're just having to reacquire all their old users, people that have been on the platform before, or maybe even lost their account and they're, they're, they're coming back.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  I don't know, but it's like, that's twenty-four hundred dollars of marketing per new user on a site that every American already knows exists.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  Sure, yeah.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  So where's all that money going, right?

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  That's rough.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  So, I don't think going is, is, I, I don't think he's buying eBay.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Like, I, just watching Ryan, I don't think he's buying eBay because he thinks he's smarter than eBay's product team. I think he's buying eBay because he can see two billion dollars of fat that Wall Street has been pricing as fixed cost. And so he goes, okay, let me cut that, and the interest on the debt just pays for itself.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm, interesting.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Right?

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  But he doesn't necessarily want to say that because he could kind of

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  give that idea to the management team.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  But he still has to put the money together, right? But i- i- is your thesis that like, the deal is coming together? He has investors that he's talking to, but it's too early to say, oh yeah, I actually do have a fund that's gonna give me another five over here. I got seven over here, and it will math out, but just give me a week. Or is there something else going on?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  It depends on which investors he's talking to, but if he was pitching me, here's what I would underwrite, right? I'd say, okay, that's the floor. The floor is Ryan's gonna cut two billion dollars from this thing of fat, put that into treasuries, and we're gonna make more money than it's currently yielding. Okay, so that's the floor. Now the ceiling, because I'm a, I'm a technology investor, right?

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, the opportunity, the bull case.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Bull case, so Amazon's used and collect, collectibles business has been flat for six years. They tried renewed, they tried collectibles, they tried trade-in, none of it scaled. You cannot put a nineteen sixty-two Mickey Mantle card through the same warehouse as a phone charger. That category, that category, right? Collectibles is structurally defensible against Amazon.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Amazon is for phone chargers, Mickey Mantle for eBay, right?

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  eBay has the marketplace, GameStop has, GameStop has like sixteen hundred stores that could physically verify the good. That's a real mo.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  And it's worth more in the AI era than the human era, right? Right? Bec- why? Because when AI agents, I, I collect, I love collect like rare pens, okay? This is a Montblanc.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Rare pen guy. I love it. I'm a pen guy. Yeah. And I love old vintage glasses. I don't know if you can see my Jacques Marimash box in the back. Oh, cool. Nice. But when I'm out of time, what do I do? I have Claude go look for rare pens and glasses for me online. The biggest problem with used rare asset purchases is fraud. Yeah. So I often will tell, so Claude will be like, Andre, I found this amazing pen, this Montblanc pen. And I say, okay, can you triple check that it's, it's, is real, it's not fake? Yeah. And that's where things go off real, because there's no way for him to verify that without messaging the agent and so on. Yeah. But if you have sixteen hundred stores where people who have Montblanc pens can go and physically verify those assets at GameStop. Sure.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Now Claude just says, yeah, I checked. It has the physical verification stamp from. Somebody brought it in. Exactly. So you, you can't, you need physical verification built into the system for agentic commerce. And look, the reason I know this is real is because a few years ago, I think you, you guys, we talked about this last time, but I sold my last startup to a company called Discord in twenty twenty, peak pandemic. So I come on as the head of platform. My, my, my job is supposed to be, you know, Andre, go build SDKs, APIs and so on for gaming. Uh, we helped this company called Midjourney get going, AI, you know, generated. But twelve months later, suddenly I find myself running without realizing an e-commerce business because it was the summer of NFTs. Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  And the, the, the board apes are blowing up and suddenly we have more than ten billion dollars of GMV flowing through Discord buy, sell, pay channel. Yeah. And Jason and Stan are like, hey, brother, your job is to like capture a piece of that pie. Yeah. Okay, homework accepted. So we start doing a deep dive. And we realize ultimately the, what, what these users need and pay for, like, so you have liquidity, right? Ultimately, that's what a, a marketplace like eBay and Discord, um, provide in sort of community commerce is liquidity. But you cannot provide liquidity if you don't have physical verification. And for Discord, that was just out of scope. You know, used sneakers.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  And it worked, you're saying it worked for NFTs because you had the on-chain.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't need any physical, there's nothing physical to verify.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  You owned it and you can transact.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yep. Exactly. And so we had, we are bootstrapping the e-commerce platform at Discord with NFTs. But of course, everyone on the board is like, well, how long are NFTs going to last? It's a fad. So Ange, what else is coming? And we go look at rare sneakers, there are keyboards, like pens, all this stuff that nerds like me love. But for those, you need physical verification. And once we realized physical verification was out of scope, we nixed the project.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're not going to go have the 1,400 like retail locations where people can drop things off. Yeah, that's, that's, that's quite, that's quite interesting.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  So that's when I realized, okay, eBay is this undervalued asset. And I hope that Ryan has figured it out as well. Because if he hasn't, he's giving me ideas.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Have you, have you tried to walk through what, what, uh, you know, given that you're probably more AGI-pilled than, than I would say 90, 90% of, of VCs? Have you tried to play out, what is it, what, how would you, how would you build eBay from the ground up today? With an agent-first approach? Is that even the right question to ask?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Look, I, I have not, guys, because right now I'm in a, I'm a compute infrastructure guy, right? We started AMP as this public benefit corporation whose job is to be an independent system operator of the compute grid. We think about, we think we're roughly in like 1885 industrial England where the steam engine's been invented. Everybody knows that you can make cool new products like, you know, uh, steel and, and notebooks and pens and cars. And there's this very scarce input called coal that everybody is hoarding. In this case, it's compute.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  And when I, if you fly over industrial era England, you'll see all these factories getting set up. And everyone's running a generator in their backyard at half-capacity. And I'm going, this makes no sense. If I'm looking at all my portfolio companies, you know, you have these, these clusters are running at like half utilization. In fact, Elon's like got 500,000 GB300s in Memphis at running at 11% MFU and less than 60% ignored allocation. I mean, this is $12 billion of compute being wasted. So I set up AMP as an AI infrastructure organization where we buy a bunch of compute. We do long-term leases, we pull that, all those clusters on the grid. We coordinate capacity, drive up utilization. And by the end of this year, I think we'll have, you know, several billion dollars of compute coming online. But that's what I've been focused on night and day since like I left Andreessen Horowitz in January.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  And so, no, I have not had time to look at how to redo eBay, but if Ryan called, I'd probably help him out. But right now, it's wartime on compute, guys.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I want to talk about AMP, but I also want to talk about, just last question on the combination of eBay and GameStop. Like, I get the thesis, the bull case. GameStop is $10 billion, eBay is like $48 billion right now. You put them together, maybe you get to $100 billion. I'm in for the bull case. The question is like, what's going on with like the plan? Because it feels like Ryan just doesn't have the capital, but then he announced it. Like, what do you think is happening behind the scenes? Because there's one thing where you could throw it out as like, oh, like, these two companies should work together. Here's a bull case. Let me know if you want to be on the team that does this. And then there's the other one, which is like, make the offer before the capital's lined up. But

• 9:58John Coogan?

  I just haven't been through enough of these stories to actually understand like, why it's playing out this way.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, I think he's sitting there with, he has $9 billion of cash.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  He's in a $10 billion company. I think when he announced this, I think he expected the stock to pop like crazy, and he'd be going on CNBC being like, this merger could make sense.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  And I think that-

• 10:21John Coogan?

  We'll issue another $20 billion of equity, and then we'll merge or something.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  And I think if you looked at, I think if you looked at like, how kind of frothy some things in the market could be, you could have imagined that playing out. I mean, the Allbirds thing was, I'm sure you appreciated that from a meme standpoint.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Direct competitor to you. Good luck.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, direct competitor.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  You gotta be careful.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  AMP versus Allbirds will be the new horse race.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  No.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, that was my read. Because GameStop is basically valued at like, the brand is, and all the retail locations and everything is valued at like, $1 billion, right?

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  He's getting no credit for all the cash.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  So, to be clear, AMP is not a cloud business. We are, so I started AMP as a holdings business.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  And I've got an infrastructure business and a capital business. And the infrastructure business secures compute and passes on at cost to our portfolio companies. We have more than $1.3 billion in commits for our first fund. I've been at it eight weeks.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  And so, we do the venture capital investments. We put $300 million into EnzoFic.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, cool. But we need to raise another roughly, you know, $6.5 billion this year, and more is getting committed by the day.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  But we give away the compute at cost to the independent ecosystem, because my belief is that, you know, that they're like, sort of- The optimal unit of research today is a like a focused down tense team outside of the hyperscalers, you know, anthropic encoding, which was I was the first one of the first thing. I'm certainly, I think, the first angel investor, if not the first investor in the round.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  They're saying you're the Jason Calacanis of anthropic.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, JCal, I could never top JCal, but like if JCal intern or something, fine, I'll take the win. But I think more importantly, like I think compute is the strategic asset, which I've been yelling about for four years, and it's a primary bottleneck on these teams. And if you're not at the hyperscalers, you just can't get access. So we buy up that compute, we give it at cost to the portfolio companies, and then we reinvest the profits of carry and fees to buy more compute and so on and so forth. And so I'll take as much capacity as I can get from Allbirds. I love it when new people go into the business because that gives us more supply. So if you're the Allbirds CEO listening to this, please send us your compute, we'll take it all.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  That makes that makes a lot of sense. What are you excited to invest in? You're investing in teams that need a lot of compute. You're trying to find things that aren't going to get steamrolled by anthropic, who's another big portfolio company. There's, you know.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  There's application layer stuff, there's Neo Labs, there's a lot of other different things that need compute, but what do you think?

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  Because I feel like I feel like a lot of, a lot of ECs are, would never say this out loud, but a lot of, I get the sense from a lot of ECs that they're kind of like paralyzed, where they're like, they really don't, they don't have a clear sort of understanding of where things will be in five years. And they feel like they need to be active. And so it's a mix of like doing new Neo, doing some Neo, Neo Labs, maybe doing some application layer stuff and just kind of praying. But I would hope that you have a, given, given your background and how you're approaching this, you have like. A stronger thesis on where the opportunities to invest at the early stages.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Look, in some sense, it's back to the future. I started my career at Kleiner Perkins when I was nineteen. My first board seat was as an observer with John Doerr when I was twenty. I wasn't old enough to drive. Technic- oh, drink, sorry. I didn't have a driver's license. I wasn't old enough to drink. And I got the chance to apprentice with the greats like Brooke Byers. And that's the vintage of venture capitalists I grew up admiring, like Arthur Rock. And that's our thesis at AMP on the venture capital side. Our business is called the AMP Foundry, where we help create, co-design new labs one at a time. My current one is called Periodic Labs. And we just decided to lead this series. I led the seed round last year with Liam, who was the co-creator of ChatGPT, and Doj, who was there, who led some of the quantum physics teams at DeepMind. And we're trying to find new high-temperature superconductors there with physical. We have a thirty thousand square foot facility in Menlo Park.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  I spend three days a week there. We do a stand-up every morning from eight AM to eight thirty AM. And then we make our priorities and then go execute. And, you know, basically, we have AIs predict new materials. We then have robots synthesize the new materials. We then have an X-ray diffraction machine that tests whether the material has the properties that the AI said. And then we pipe that verification loop back into the training ground like as many times as we need for the agents to continue predicting new superconductors. And in the last ninety days, we've had more material verification than I think in the last decade in the field. And so I'm a huge believer in unblocking frontier progress in domains where the verification sort of loop is clearly just like, we know it's going to work, but execution is the bottleneck. And then I like getting the best teams, the best scientists, the best engineers, the capital, the compute, the commercial help they need.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Now, I think that the beauty about having Anthropic around is that it's made this idea of the bitter lesson and scaling legible to the capital markets. So now, instead of me having to call up twenty-two friends, I'm getting twenty-one knows, which was the case with the seed round of Anthropic. Now, I make two calls. Instead, we get like, you know, we get three times oversubscribed. So capital is no longer the bottleneck, which is phenomenal. You know, again, I've been at it eight weeks, have more than a billion dollars committed from our first fund. I'm a solo key man GP on the fund. And there's lots of institutions, pension funds, sovereign funds, who are like, how much more can you put to work? Especially in publics, privates, buyouts. It's a bonanza for people who want to be true partners, who want to be the Arthur Rock of this era. I think if you believe in the bitter lesson, it's not new. It's been around for ages. You and I, the three of us talked about this like over a year ago at the last recent Harwitz AGM.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, still bitter.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  I'm more zen than I am bitter.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  How are you thinking about building out the team on both sides? Trust is the mode. So there's five of us on the team. My full-time engineering co-founder Sebastian Lobo, we were roommates 14 years ago at Stanford, and then he went on to build a grid.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  What was that one?

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Overnight success. Thank you. 12-year overnight success in California.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  So Seb and Midha built the Borg Export GQM scheduler, which kept the Google internal capacity pool at more than 95% utilization there. If it was at 94% utilization, that was considered a major outage globally.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Andrew Erskine is my partner on the operations side. He was a partner at Oric, which was the outside counsel for Anthropic. And he was my GC at Ubiquiti6, which was the company I sold to Discord. And then Rosie, who was my chief of staff, ran comms for me from Edelman when I was at Andreessen Horowitz, you know, when I was a VP there. So you got the band back together? It's the Ange reunion, basically. And, you know, we called AMP not after my initials. Sometimes people think that. It's not an Antmeda partners, anything like that. It's about energy. It's about amperers, the unit of energy. And we want to amp things up because we think we're entering like the great renaissance in technology. And, you know, if you can have a small team that trusts each other across context, you know, compute, capital, sports teams, buyouts, leverage, technology, all of this stuff.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  It's, these are all buckets and categories that we've all put, you know, traditional capital allocators have put around these asset classes that shouldn't exist. And I think if you have the flexibility to go back to first principles with a small team that you trust, you can execute, you know, with orders of magnitude less, a size of a team as a firm in this new era with the right tools. I don't know if that makes sense.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  No, totally. You mentioned taking positions in public companies. The fund structure is a PBC. Are you also an RIA? Like, how are you thinking about navigating both of those asset classes? Since that's a little more traditional.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  We are in process. Yes, we are in process of becoming an RIA because, you know, we founded the firm barely. Yeah, ninety days ago, but I'm used to that cadence because Andreessen Horowitz was a RIA. I was a general partner in the AI Infrastructure Fund for several years, as you guys know. And we weren't RIA. I'm used to the compliance, the regulatory sort of guardrails we got to follow. And I think LPs trust us to, you know, have that cadence from day one. And so we're, we're gonna make sure that we, you know, Zach, if you remember this, this like, you know, twelve years ago, Zach went on TV to say, move fast and break things. And then you have to update the thing to be like, move fast with stable infrastructure. And, and I think we move fast with stable infrastructure from day one, essentially, because we are an AI infrastructure team.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the PBC, uh, like, if I'm playing back, like, what, what year were you referencing? Eighteen fifty or something like that?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Eighteen eighty-five.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  Eighteen eighty-five. So if I go back to eighteen eighty-five and I think about the financiers that, uh, you know, created the industrial build out, uh, they were not public benefit corporations.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  They were personal benefit.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, and I mean, there was a lot of good that was created. We got railroads and trains and, you know, machinery and cars and all sorts of things out of the industrial revolution. Uh, there were also things that were rough and there was unionization and battles and back and forth. Like, what is the PBC in service of solving? What, what, what, why PBC?

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, great question. So there's the, um, I, I'll tell you the substantive answer and then the vibes answer, right?

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  So, um, from a substantive perspective, we, we do two things, right? We have a venture capital business and we have an infrastructure business. Both things have this very unique property called positive externalities. When implemented correctly, venture capital can unlock massive positive externalities for the ecosystem and for the world, because you end up funding innovation when done correctly. And then infrastructure, the same, right? When you have compute that's used by small, focused, downed, dense teams like Anthropic, that's able to produce ten times more soda capabilities than like DeepMind, which is, you know, sixty thousand or one hundred and sixty thousand people, then you're generating positive externalities for the world by being much more efficient per unit of input with the output they create. And so I was like, huh, well, what happens when, as an economist, you look at positive externalities? Usually you have market failure. You have underconsumption of that good. Well, how do you correct the market failure? Usually you get the government to intervene, but if you don't have the government intervening in time,

• 19:38Speaker 02

  what do you do? You become a private sector participant. And then if you look at the arc of eighteen eighty-five, you know, private sector businesses that ended up correcting market failure by... Um, by producing public benefits, they ended up getting regulated as utilities.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  That's what AMP is. AMP is a self-regulated utility of that provides venture capital and infrastructure to the world's leading scientific teams, the next Dario, the next, you know, uh, Guillaume at Mistral, who created Lama, the next Robin, who created stable diffusion. These are the my, my generation's smartest minds. I'm not smart enough to be, you know, them, but I can be their intern. And instead of waiting for the rest of the space to come up with standards and institutions to enforce this, we're like, dude, let's just do it ourselves and show the world you can have fun while doing it with a small team. You don't need to be, you know, some, something called a, um, you know, with like these words like RIA, multi-stage asset class firm, doesn't matter. Just let's skip ahead to the part, the good part and, and like, you know, use all the proceeds

• 20:34Speaker 02

  that we get from management fees and carry to keep the space like innovating at the pace that we were promised, you know, 12, 13 years ago. And instead we got tweets and not flying cars. You know, when I was at Stanford, I got the chance as an undergrad, I had the chance to take Peter Thiel's class, the zero to one. And he was, you know, his whole moniker was, we want to fly in cars and we got, uh, you know, um, uh,

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and forty.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Forty characters.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Well, two hundred and forty characters. Thank you. And now I'm back at Stanford teaching CS one fifty-three, which is the largest class on campus. It's called AI Coachella. We've got thousands of people following along.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Coachella is a good one.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  And it's got frontier systems because it's all possible now. We're literally, I, in our lifetime, we're going to have flying cars. We're going to have room temperature superconductors. We are going to solve cancer. We just want to do it in a way that's stable, predictable. We want to skip all the boom and bust cycles. And the way to do that is to lead by example and say, hey, guys, the public benefit, you know, is to provide goods and services that are utilities and make sure that we, we don't like, let's be the adults in the room and not do the stuff where we try to be robber bands and monopolists and got greedy along the way. And so that's the substantive answer. The vibes answer is, look, I don't want to get sued by shareholders for whom it's not legible why I'm giving away billions of dollars of compute at cost to portfolio companies, right? Because we, that's what we're doing. And that shareholder, that's, you could argue that shareholder value that we're destroying.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  But I would argue in the long term, we're actually creating orders of magnitude more value. And if you look at Ben and Jerry's, you look at REI, they've become stable enduring businesses in categories that are fairly crowded. And eventually I do think technology and AI will get crowded. It will get commoditized because technology is never the mode. Trust is, community is the mode, culture is the mode, execution is the mode. And so we're trying to skip ahead to that part, but it takes time for people to get aligned. So until then,

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, we see, well, we see an AMP joint venture with private equity. To help distribute. Diffusion.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  If we can, yeah, you know, if you go to our website, it's called amppublic.com because I do think if you look back to the like vulture era of private equity, you remember like RJR Nabisco and what barbarians at the gate, we should just learn from from their mistakes and go, can we do private equity, but done right in an aligned way? Let's not rush to like lay off, you know, hundreds of thousands of people and then not re-educate them and prepare them for their new opportunities. I I'm an optimist, as you guys know, I came from Andreessen Horowitz, so I I'm a sort of a rational optimist and I believe the transition can be done in a positive way.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Is that me getting kicked off? There's like a bell ringing, but that might be here.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't know.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  No, the only bell we have is this, but no, we're.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  We got plenty of sounds for you. Continue, continue.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Well, we will do everything, we, everything we do is governed by a public benefit charter. So if we do private equity, it'll be governed in the public benefit. If we do education stuff, that'll be in the public benefit.

• 23:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Look, I've made more money than I know what to do in life. I'm thirty four and I'm just getting started. So my goal is I'll be remembered for having been a net positive influence in the space. I just got tired of telling people I told you so, because after a while they start looking at my returns and going, why didn't you give me a call? And I said, I did look at your email. I introduced you to Anthropic and the Series A and the Series B and the Series C. And so at some point I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna go direct, talk to the LPs, set up a platform, build infrastructure. And hopefully be known as a generally like sane, common sense, rational point of view on stuff that can often be, is not legible to people from different parts of the stack. And that's what the class is about. So CS153.stanford.edu, I would recommend anybody watching, go check it out. The lectures are all online and the first one went on on Stanford's official page on Thursday.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  Was that with Scott Nolan?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  So Scott, no, actually, Scott was lecture eight. I put up lecture, we put up lecture one, which is mine as a kind of the opening act, because you know, Scott is one of the mainliners, the headliners of AI Coachella. Scott will be up soon as well. And then Jensen was last week, so I think he followed Scott.

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  Well. Last question for me. Do you think the world is prepared for it not to be a bubble?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  That's a good question. The world, if the world prepared not for it to be a bubble. Oh, yeah, yeah. Inertia is, guys, inertia is a powerful thing. Most of the world still has no idea what AI is. It is crazy. And I've been flying to places where I thought there would be diffusion of AI by now. And they just aren't, barely using Claude, ChatGPT. I mean, these things are still alien to most of the world. And so if, if, if we stopped capabilities today and half of us in the AI ecosystem vanished off the planet, nothing would change. It's still so early.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is really.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, great to catch up. Congratulations on a very impressive fundraiser and a very unique approach. And looking forward to the next conversation.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Guys, on a generational run, and I hope the acquisition does nothing but give you guys more steroids and more fuel for the fire. We need more of you every day.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude. Congrats.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys. Bye.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.