Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #101: Anthropic Files Its S1, Owning GPUs Isn't Compute, Is Venture Just Closet Indexing?
Transcript
- 0:00The irony is I think for better or for worse, when you're in a capital dense geographic
- 0:04location like San Francisco or New York, you get signals about what's happening in in the
- 0:09fundraising markets whether you want them or not.
- 0:10And if you're not there, you're reading about these rounds six to nine months later, and
- 0:14you're probably scratching your head saying, how did that company get all of that money?
- 0:18I feel bad because a lot of times those people show up and they're like, here's my report
- 0:21card.
- 0:21I finished all the problems.
- 0:22I was like, but you were in the wrong chapter.
- 0:24It's the week of October 26.
- 0:27Welcome to the learning corner a Precursor Ventures podcast.
- 0:32Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
- 0:34I'm Mia Foranum, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
- 0:38be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
- 0:42week.
- 0:43Our first piece this week is, of course, the news that Anthropoc has, in fact, filed its s
- 0:48one with SEC, setting up an Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT.
- 0:52The numbers in the prospectus are staggering.
- 0:55They've got 16,300,000,000 in revenue in the first half of twenty twenty six, up from about
- 1:001,160,000,000 in the same period a year earlier and well past the 4,600,000,000 it did in all
- 1:06of 2025.
- 1:07The headline net loss of $80,700,000,000 looks alarming, but everyone knows at this point most
- 1:14of that is a $72,000,000,000 noncash charge tied to convertible notes, derivative, safes,
- 1:20and the company actually posted 974,000,000 in operating income in the second quarter.
- 1:26Also discloses that more than $430,000,000,000 are locked in cloud compute commitments, and
- 1:32that roughly one fifth of its revenue comes from just two customers.
- 1:36On governance, the seven cofounders keep around 50.1% of voting power through a single founder
- 1:42share, while the long term benefit trust they set up, elects a majority of the board, last
- 1:47valued at 965,000,000,000 in a private round in May.
- 1:51This listing will, of course, be the final test of how public markets price a frontier AI lab.
- 1:57Yeah.
- 1:57Charles, wanted to ask you what the general pulse is feeling like in San Francisco with the
- 2:01impending IPO on the horizon.
- 2:04So I had a meeting yesterday at an office with one of the people who was doing the book
- 2:09underwriting on the IPO, and it was it was busy in that office.
- 2:12I think everyone's trying to figure out what will happen.
- 2:15Of course, with the headlines like, oh my god.
- 2:17All of this wealth infusion into San Francisco. I'm
- 2:19I'm like, well, someone who lives here, there's already a lot of wealth in San Francisco.
- 2:22And two, unlike the Google Facebook era, a lot of that wealth has already leaked into the
- 2:27market through secondaries and tenders.
- 2:29And also just like the general appreciation in mag savvy stocks, and a lot of those people
- 2:33live here.
- 2:33So I think it's gonna be fascinating to see what happens.
- 2:37A few of my friends were like, oh, well, once this goes public and people start to leave, I'm
- 2:42like, I've seen some crazy stats about the number of centimillionaire and decimillionaires
- 2:47that are gonna be made.
- 2:48They're gonna be minted.
- 2:49I'm like, look, I wouldn't assume that all these people are just gonna go start tech
- 2:52companies.
- 2:52For a couple reasons, one, they might have a really robust view of what Anthropics near term
- 2:57potential is.
- 2:58And so, like, I'm not jumping in front of that buzzsaw.
- 3:00They might just say, I have enough money.
- 3:01I wanna go become a pastry chef.
- 3:03And I bring these things up because, like, this happened in the .com era.
- 3:06There are people who are just like, wow.
- 3:07I suddenly have all the money I need.
- 3:09Now that I have freedom, I wanna go pursue things outside of tech.
- 3:13I think it'll be fascinating.
- 3:14And for me, the...
- 3:15One of the more interesting things is we'll finally have public eyes on these companies.
- 3:20I think everything else has been more innuendo or leak reports or company status stuff.
- 3:26And I think we'll finally have, you know, 10 q level reporting on these companies.
- 3:30And I think the interesting thing is it'll give people a chance to inspect these companies
- 3:35maybe who are slightly more skeptical or who think differently about the long term value of
- 3:41these companies.
- 3:41And I think it's a real bellwether moment for Venture.
- 3:44I think it's a bellwether moment for a handful of firms like Spark and Menlo.
- 3:48And I don't know.
- 3:49I think it's gonna be fascinating.
- 3:50I keep looking at what's happening in the macro environment.
- 3:54And the one thing that I think is fascinating is if I were Anthropic, I'd be like, compute is
- 3:58this, like, existential risk for us.
- 4:01We're able to cobble it together by calling our friends the hyperscalers and SpaceX.
- 4:06And we have these neo clouds, and we find together...
- 4:09At some point, I'm like, at $500,000,000,000, it's clearly existential.
- 4:13And I'll be very curious to see how they think about financing compute going forward.
- 4:17Well, there is the undercurrent conversation I felt like on X that this is as good as what the
- 4:23business is gonna look like ever, and so that's why they won IPO today.
- 4:26Do you have any comments on that?
- 4:27I guess it's all skeptical at this point.
- 4:29I think it might've...
- 4:30I'm not sure who said it.
- 4:31It might've been Benedict Evans.
- 4:33Someone said that Anthropic s one is a Rorschach test.
- 4:36And on the one hand, you're like, wow.
- 4:38This business is highly dependent on a very small number of customers spending a whole lot
- 4:43of money.
- 4:44That's a bad signal for the health and wellness of the AI business.
- 4:49The flip side is this is a gigantic business where only a very small number of people have
- 4:54figured out how to take advantage of this technology, imagine how much greater it can
- 4:58become when others get on the same train.
- 5:01And in some ways, I feel like that's the existential question about all of this AI
- 5:04stuff.
- 5:05It's like, are the San Francisco frontier billboard people, are they living in the future
- 5:10that we will all inhabit?
- 5:12And years from now, many people will be AI maxing and using AI as aggressively as the
- 5:18people in my zip code?
- 5:20Or are we on some weird feature branch of the future where we're running an experiment where
- 5:24a very small number of people are using this technology very intensely, and that feature
- 5:27branch will, like, never end up on main.
- 5:29Because most people will be like, I'm not gonna do what you're doing.
- 5:32I'm not gonna live that way.
- 5:33AI is not gonna become that integral into my business or life.
- 5:37And I think if we're on a future branch, we're probably overdoing it.
- 5:40And if that future branch ends up back on main, then, like, we're just living in the future.
- 5:44We're just, like, a few years ahead of what everybody else will do.
- 5:47And I think it's funny if you live in San Francisco, you're like, well, of course, we're
- 5:50just living in the near future.
- 5:51Everybody else is going to be using this stuff in the same way with the same intensity as we
- 5:56are.
- 5:56And my experience has been, that's not how technology diffusion It always takes longer
- 6:00than people think.
- 6:01And I think we're gonna be in FDE land for a lot longer than people think.
- 6:06I think it's gonna take a lot longer for...
- 6:07Because I've seen it even in our little firm.
- 6:09The changes you have to make to the way that you work to really get value out of AI are not
- 6:14trivial.
- 6:15And it's not just like laying off people.
- 6:17It's also reimagining the way that work gets done, ripping stuff up, and, you know, getting
- 6:21people to change habits and habits.
- 6:22Habits are like a safety blanket in corporate America.
- 6:25You're like, we do this thing this way, and if I follow this rule and do it this way, I'm
- 6:29safe.
- 6:29It's a good tie into our second piece this week, which comes from a post by Nick Rubin
- 6:34over at First Round titled The Gap Between GPUs and Compute.
- 6:37It was a recap of a dinner he recently hosted with around six people who buy, they deploy,
- 6:41and operate compute for some of the biggest AI labs and infra companies.
- 6:45The headline is that demand is being treated as infinite for now, so people don't necessarily
- 6:51care about that.
- 6:52The real constraint isn't customers.
- 6:54It's capital and power.
- 6:55It creates a catch 22.
- 6:57Buyers will pay a premium for capacity today, but hesitate to commit to a specific generation
- 7:02of GPUs a year or two out.
- 7:04And without those commitments, providers can't really get the financing to build what they
- 7:08need to.
- 7:09Even after a contract is signed, getting a cluster running is so hard and labor intensive
- 7:14that one operator offered to send their own people into a provider's data center, actually,
- 7:19from that dinner conversation.
- 7:20And another attendee watched a fully approved project nearly get blocked by locals at a city
- 7:25hearing, which are dynamics we've talked about a lot on the podcast.
- 7:28Nick's takeaway sums it up pretty well.
- 7:31Quote, AI moves fast, but the infrastructure underneath it takes years to build.
- 7:36There's been more and more chatter about how the financing should work for the actual
- 7:39infrastructure that enables compute.
- 7:41This post is obviously a really good reminder of it.
- 7:43We haven't even talked about the neo cloud drama
- 7:46Yes.
- 7:46That swirled last week, which is a bit adjacent to this.
- 7:49But the concept that there is a disconnect between owning GPUs and having usable compute
- 7:54was the main takeaway in this post.
- 7:56Any additional thoughts you've been having on this entire subject right now?
- 8:00I know you talked about kind of like different errors that you've lived through before.
- 8:03We've talked about fiber and laying all of that into the ground more than what we needed to.
- 8:08How does this compare?
- 8:09I think it's fascinating.
- 8:11And maybe I'm being a little bit of a nervous Nelly, but I feel like people aren't paying
- 8:15enough attention to what's happening in the credit markets when it comes to finance. If
- 8:19If I look at a lot of this AI data center spend, it's not all speculative in the sense
- 8:24that, like, if we had this capacity, I think a lot of it would get used today.
- 8:28It's speculative in the sense that, like, the cash flows for this stuff are gonna come many,
- 8:31many years in the future.
- 8:33And I don't know how you finance the level of compute expansion that's required without
- 8:37capital markets being supportive.
- 8:39And I think with the Neo Cloud thing, it's the first wobble we've seen where people are like,
- 8:43well, maybe these...
- 8:45All these Neo Clouds won't work out.
- 8:46And, also, like, I've talked to a handful of our portfolio companies, including one one
- 8:50founder who's done a real deep dive on sub 10 megawatt data center construction.
- 8:54What he describes to me sounds kind of like buying any illegal substance on the black
- 8:59market.
- 8:59He's like, I found this guy.
- 9:01He's like, I got GPUs.
- 9:02And he's like, you got GPUs.
- 9:04Let me see the GPUs.
- 9:05No.
- 9:05Well, okay.
- 9:06I actually don't have GPUs.
- 9:07I got a guy who's got g p...
- 9:08Everything is murky and fast and loose because the demand is so high.
- 9:12And so I don't know what happens if the credit markets begin to tighten for some of this AI
- 9:17demand.
- 9:17I don't know what happens if some...
- 9:19Know, everything gets contracted compute.
- 9:20I'm like, well, the risk in the contracted compute scenario is that the contracted entity
- 9:25cannot pay.
- 9:26Yes.
- 9:26They have signed and they have committed, but you've gotta go build the thing and they've
- 9:30gotta be around to pay you in the future.
- 9:32And I think that is risky.
- 9:33And if you treat that as, a 100% certainty, that's probably not good business.
- 9:37I really wonder what happens if the credit markets either...
- 9:40I don't think they'll shut off AI spend.
- 9:42I think that would be wild.
- 9:43But the cost of capital could go up pretty materially.
- 9:46I think that's what you're seeing with, like, some of the the Corweave stuff around pricing
- 9:50and the credit default swaps.
- 9:52And even with Oracle, these things to pencil, they're harder to pencil if, basically, the
- 9:56effective cost of capital or interest rates you have to pay and that money goes And if you
- 9:59think compute is tight and hard to get now, I think it was AWS said, hey, we're basically
- 10:03sold out through next year.
- 10:04And again, a lot of people are contracting for compute that they expect to need, but you can
- 10:08envision a a cycle where capital for data center build gets expensive, and so people
- 10:15build less and also get tighter on ROI, maybe charge more, which means people say, oh, that
- 10:21thing I was doing that was fun and free, maybe I can't do that. You can
- 10:24You can envision, like, a cycle, a feedback loop that gets negative.
- 10:27I don't think we're on the cusp of that, but I'm certainly keeping an eye on this because by
- 10:31all accounts, we need a lot more compute, and the only way I can see to finance that is with
- 10:35credit.
- 10:36And even if I were to bring it to the equity side of conversations, especially for some of
- 10:40the folks who are building in that space, I mean, rounds that have been announced from
- 10:44folks like Etch, they need hundreds of millions of dollars.
- 10:47The question becomes, at what point will those funds realize if it's working or not working?
- 10:52Because I think Nick said it well, capital is becoming the moat.
- 10:55You absolutely need it in order to execute.
- 10:57You could dump in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into something for a large
- 11:02period of time to give yourself some runway.
- 11:04At what point do you realize it's not going to come to fruition?
- 11:07Again, credit markets, when they fall apart, are far more detrimental to ripple effects on
- 11:11the economy.
- 11:12One thing that they talked about, which we have a bit, is on the public opposition side.
- 11:17The clearest hope, I think he said, at the table was that AI starts delivering tangible
- 11:22benefits that the average person can feel, and and that being maybe a reason why people could
- 11:28become more supportive around data centers being built in their backyards.
- 11:31But I think the reality is the infrastructure has to be built before those benefits arrive.
- 11:35Yeah.
- 11:36How much runway do you think the industry has before local and political pushback
- 11:40meaningfully slows down?
- 11:42Do you think that maybe the anthropic IPO will make this easier or further for the public to
- 11:46stomach?
- 11:47I'm speaking more specifically about people who have been opposed to larger data centers, the
- 11:51infrastructure of it all, be built so closely to them.
- 11:53I mean, if you look at really the story of the Anthropic IPO, there's a very small handful of
- 11:59people who live in San Francisco who are going to make a lot of money.
- 12:02And and if you say, okay.
- 12:03Maybe not San Francisco proper.
- 12:04San Francisco Bay...
- 12:05And that includes early investors, employees, real estate agents, commercial lead...
- 12:09Like, a lot of people in a very localized...
- 12:11That tends not to build goodwill.
- 12:13If the data center's going up in your backyard and somebody in my zip code is making a lot of
- 12:18money, you're like, how does how does getting rich help me deal with this big monstrosity in
- 12:22my backyard?
- 12:23I think also we have this weird duality even in the s one where it's like this is the greatest
- 12:28technology and wealth creation thing ever.
- 12:30Also, it might kill us all.
- 12:32It might kill us all and we'll probably take your job, but otherwise, everything is amazing.
- 12:35And it's almost as if nobody put any thought into two things.
- 12:40One, is there any validity whatsoever to people's concerns and fears?
- 12:44And some of this is fear, and you should never dismiss it.
- 12:47And and two, to the extent that their fears are valid, how do we wanna respond to them other
- 12:52than being dismissive or pretending that those fears are people trying to slow down the rate
- 12:57of progress?
- 12:58It turns out they can.
- 12:59People are just like, oh, they're Luddites and, like, they don't get it.
- 13:01They're trying to slow down the the wheels of...
- 13:03I'm like, well, they seem to be succeeding by blocking these data center projects.
- 13:06So whether out of necessity or out of care, I think at some point, the AI collective
- 13:11marketing machine is gonna have to figure out how do we really wanna talk to people about
- 13:14this technology.
- 13:15Also, people aren't dumb.
- 13:16They see their bosses at work telling them to use AI, and they're getting AI slop from their
- 13:21colleagues.
- 13:21And they're seeing people get laid off so that the company can do more with AI.
- 13:25And people are just like, other than maybe Muse and Instinct being free and useful, how does
- 13:30that...
- 13:30Why does that matter if I don't have a job and can't pay my mortgage?
- 13:32Was talking to somebody else yesterday, and they're like, I don't think the average person
- 13:35is, like, reading through an s one for an impending IP owned.
- 13:39I'm like, like, I'm sure everyone has more impactful things to do with their time who
- 13:42don't sit with an tech NVC.
- 13:44But to your point, it's not like they haven't heard this down the pipeline, and it's only
- 13:48been in a negative way.
- 13:49And they still haven't quite figured out how to position this in a way that benefits everyone.
- 13:53And when I read this piece, I think that one that one part really stood out to me.
- 13:58In order to get everyone excited about it and to feel the benefits of it, you have to build
- 14:02the infrastructure infrastructure first.
- 14:02First.
- 14:03You can't do it before.
- 14:05So there has to be some other give.
- 14:07And I don't know what that'll look like, and I don't know if we we've I
- 14:10think if most people were like, you mean with ChatGPT, I can get paid for five days of work
- 14:15and work for four days, and my boss will never know.
- 14:17AI would be like the most most popular technology like ever created.
- 14:22But that's not most people's experience.
- 14:23No.
- 14:24If it was that of great, I can win back three hours of my day and sign off.
- 14:28Most people aren't like, oh, I'd love to win three back three hours back of my day so I can
- 14:31become more productive.
- 14:32The average person isn't thinking like that.
- 14:34Like, they're just not.
- 14:35The average person is like, I can win back three hours of my day, spend time with my
- 14:39family, cut back costs on childcare because I can do it at home.
- 14:42No one's thinking like, so I can become a superhuman.
- 14:44That's the average person, and I just don't think we've bridged that gap yet.
- 14:47And and I think the employer view is like, my gosh.
- 14:50For the same eight hours, I can now get 1.3, 1.4 x the productivity of this person.
- 14:56And I think this is like the lived experience of a lot of people.
- 14:59It's like, oh, AI allows me to do more work per unit of time.
- 15:02It's not to, like, do the same fixed amount of work faster.
- 15:05It's a little bit of John Henry.
- 15:06It's like, now I have to keep up with the line.
- 15:08Keep up the machine.
- 15:09More is being asked of me.
- 15:10This is probably great for the person who owns the
- 15:12Yes.
- 15:13The five people who run each company are are all...
- 15:16Yeah.
- 15:16All get to see the benefits first.
- 15:18Well, our last piece comes from Jay Gibson over at Better Tomorrow Ventures titled On Risk, and
- 15:23his argument is that venture is starting to look a lot like public markets.
- 15:26Everybody owns the same handful of names.
- 15:28Everyone is benchmarked against each other.
- 15:30Mhmm.
- 15:30And closet indexing is on the rise.
- 15:32All stats we've talked about.
- 15:34Established firms took 88.2% of all US venture capital raised so far this year.
- 15:38Megadeals of a $100,000,000 or more captured around almost 88% of the $412,000,000,000
- 15:45deployed in the first half.
- 15:46Jake says this is the opposite of 2021 because now even high quality, capital efficient
- 15:51companies get told they're not venture scale unless they check exactly the right boxes on
- 15:55category, pedigree, cap table, and AI narrative.
- 15:58He also calls out the rise of Vibe revenue from two week pilots annualized into ARR to
- 16:04contracts with ninety day opt outs, counted as reoccurring.
- 16:08Jake says that the market is trading career risk or financial risk, saying for most of the
- 16:12ecosystem, it's becoming well understood for your reputation to fail conventionally than to
- 16:17succeed unconventionally.
- 16:18So invest in the safe, expensive options, the more legible things to everyone.
- 16:22His prescription is patience at a time when patience is the world's most scarce resources.
- 16:27Wanted your thoughts on this one.
- 16:29Obviously, again, with the anthropic IPO on the horizon and likely folks going to use that as
- 16:34ammunition to continue piling into consensus market, if it goes well.
- 16:37I read Jake's post and I texted him.
- 16:39I thought it was very good.
- 16:40And Also, comments on it were funny.
- 16:43People were like, who hurt you?
- 16:44I know.
- 16:46But we talked in an earlier episode about the Nifty Fifty and that whole era.
- 16:50I read Jake's post.
- 16:51I don't know.
- 16:51The one...
- 16:51There's one book I come back to all the time because I think it explains a lot of the world.
- 16:56It's The Unaccountability Machine, which shout out to James Cham for pointing out that book to
- 17:01me a long time ago.
- 17:02One of the premises of the book is, like, every system works exactly as designed.
- 17:06And I'm like, well, what if we're in a moment where, like, really what you're seeing is the
- 17:10reflected preferences of the people who allocate capital?
- 17:13And that whether they came to this view on their own or they were influenced by VCs, the
- 17:18view is, look, there's a very small number of companies that are consequential.
- 17:22And it's hard to argue that SpaceX and Anthropic aren't two of those five.
- 17:27Those companies are so consequential that very little else can measure up and there's a
- 17:31relatively small number of people who we believe will have consistent access to those
- 17:37companies.
- 17:38Why don't we just give them all of the money?
- 17:40And I'm like, but you'll never know the counterfactual.
- 17:43You'll never know like what other people would have found amazing companies if you'd done
- 17:47something different.
- 17:47You'll never know whether those people caught a heater and been like right for some extended
- 17:52period of time but that that's not reproducible.
- 17:54There are all of these things you simply cannot know.
- 17:57And I think a lot of people were just like, it's fine.
- 17:59This is easy.
- 18:00Give all of the money to the small number of people who we think can find exceptional
- 18:05companies.
- 18:05Hope that they find them and just be done.
- 18:08If you think about it, everything else is harder.
- 18:10Meeting hundreds of fund managers to find a few people that you think have a special talent for
- 18:15company selection, and then waiting ten years to see if those people are right, that's
- 18:19harder.
- 18:20And so sometimes I read things like what Jake wrote, I'm like, maybe the system is designed
- 18:24to reflect the preferences of the people at Capital who are just...
- 18:27I want this to be easy.
- 18:29I wanna make fewer decisions, and I wanna increase my probability that I'm in the
- 18:33relatively small number of names that matter, and that's it.
- 18:36I was getting coffee with a founder yesterday morning, and it struck me that it's never been
- 18:42so important or inherent to the job of a founder to understand the business of venture
- 18:48now more than ever.
- 18:49Whereas before, like, you could really just focus on executing as a founder and being
- 18:53obsessed with an idea in a market and going in that direction.
- 18:55I would say, you need to know what's going on in venture land from the growing fund
- 19:00perspective, and then need to be a 5 to $20,000,000,000 outcome in order to be remotely
- 19:05interesting.
- 19:06Previously, I really do think you could just be a founder.
- 19:09Now I'm like, you really need to start thinking like a VC.
- 19:11I don't think that used to be the case.
- 19:13One thing I was gonna ask in 2021 when we were in the last cycle, obviously different.
- 19:18He said it well.
- 19:18Like, every good, bad company was getting overly funded at overly valued prices.
- 19:23And we did have funds at larger sizes back then, obviously not at the magnitude that they
- 19:28are today.
- 19:29Why didn't we see, like, an immediate drop off of funding for, like, sub $5,000,000,000 market
- 19:34companies back then?
- 19:35Is it really just because we didn't know those were that possible?
- 19:38Why didn't we see as much of a drop off?
- 19:40I think this cycle is gonna last.
- 19:43If you think about it, there's still a lot of zombie corn, whatever you wanna call it.
- 19:46A lot of companies that raised a bunch of money in 2021 cut expenses, and they're still around.
- 19:51They're still around.
- 19:51They're still alive.
- 19:52They're still operating because they cut costs and held onto that cash because they knew there
- 19:57was, like, no more coming.
- 19:58And for all those companies, we still don't have a final reckoning.
- 20:00Like, they haven't shut down.
- 20:01They haven't sold.
- 20:02They're on people's books at some price, probably pretty close to the top of market.
- 20:06And I think we're kinda doing the same thing here, except we're doing it two ticks earlier.
- 20:10Instead of giving companies with a few million in ARR, a bunch of money on a high future
- 20:15revenue multiple.
- 20:16We're giving it to companies at inception, which means there'll be companies that raise
- 20:19$2,030.40, $50,000,000 pre product market fit.
- 20:22If things tighten, those companies will still have 20 or $30,000,000 in the bank and Yeah.
- 20:27Will abandon whatever original scaling and business model they had.
- 20:30And those companies could take seven to ten years to play out.
- 20:34But the people who invested in them will probably be able to raise new funds while those
- 20:39founders are stuck sorting all that stuff out.
- 20:41And so this is to me, like, the weird irony of
- 20:43these
- 20:43very large inception stage or growth stage financings is it puts the day of reckoning for
- 20:49these companies way into the future because they can afford to just operate and live for a
- 20:53really long time.
- 20:54That, I think, is the biggest irony is, I would say, the larger your market or opportunity is,
- 21:00the less validation you need in the earlier stages to lock in.
- 21:04And Jake talks about Vibe Revenue saying if the bar for a series a is a specific growth curve,
- 21:09founders will figure it out.
- 21:10And I think that was my question, and I'd love your perspective.
- 21:13You think founders building at this, like, preconception stage are catching on as well.
- 21:18There are actually no benchmarks and things that I need.
- 21:21There's people I meet who deeply understand the way that VCs are making decisions.
- 21:26I'd argue a lot of those people are in San Francisco or in New York.
- 21:30They're close enough, and they're watching people raise, and they're like, oh, this is
- 21:34some mix of vibes, having a timely problem, having a team that people understand.
- 21:38These are the things that matter.
- 21:40And I have other people who are still chasing ARR benchmarks from 2020.
- 21:43And I feel really bad for the people who are chasing ARR benchmarks from 2021.
- 21:47Was like, you're playing the wrong game and you don't even you don't even know it.
- 21:51No.
- 21:51It's response...
- 21:52I get it, like, why you think that it is what you should be shooting for.
- 21:55And I almost feel gross saying, like, you need to abandon that if we're going for something
- 21:59bigger.
- 21:59And I feel bad because a lot of times those people show up, and they're like, here's my
- 22:03report card.
- 22:03I, like, have all of the...
- 22:05I finished all the problems.
- 22:06I was like, but you were in the wrong chapter.
- 22:07The irony is I think for better or for worse, when you're in a capital dense geographic
- 22:12location like San Francisco or New York, you get signals about what's happening in in the
- 22:16fundraising markets whether you want them or not.
- 22:18So you don't have to be actively fundraising.
- 22:20You've got friends, neighbors, people you know, friends of friends who are raising rounds, and
- 22:25you're like, how do they get that crazy round?
- 22:27Oh, dude.
- 22:27Like, this person said in their DMs and heard that they like poker game.
- 22:31You you get a sense of how things are happening.
- 22:33And if you're not there, you're reading about these rounds six to nine months later, and
- 22:37you're probably scratching your head saying, how did that company get all of that money?
- 22:40And all along, you've been playing a different game.
- 22:42Would you say one of the most important things that you need to do right now if you're a
- 22:45founder and you're wanting to build consequential comedy, you absolutely have to be
- 22:48in those two geographies.
- 22:49Ideally, probably SF.
- 22:50I think if you're not there, you need incredible connectivity.
- 22:54You need incredible connectivity.
- 22:56So much so that I'm just like, it's probably easier to just be in one of those places.
- 23:00Well, we are all out of time today.
- 23:01Thank you, Charles, for jumping in.
- 23:03Thank you to all of our listeners as well.
- 23:05We had a bunch of new folks join us last week, so stay tuned.
- 23:08We'll drop a new episode next week.
- 23:10Thanks.
- 23:10Bye.
- 23:11Bye.